Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives (Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800)) (Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800), 41) 9782503575827, 250357582X

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Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century

SEUH 41 Studies in European Urban History (1100–1800)

Series Editors

Marc Boone Anne-Laure Van Bruaene Ghent University

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century Urban Perspectives

Edited by Ethan Matt Kavaler Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

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Cover illustration: Pieter Bruegel the Elder - Three soldiers (1568), Oil on oak panel, purchased by The Frick Collection, 1965. Wikimedia Commons. © 2017, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2017/0095/187 ISBN 978-2-503-57582-7 DOI 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.113997 e-ISBN 978-2-503-57741-8 Printed on acid-free paper.

Table of Contents Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene Introduction ix Space & Time Jelle De Rock From Generic Image to Individualized Portrait. The Pictorial City View in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries

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Ethan Matt Kavaler Mapping Time. The Netherlandish Carved Altarpiece in the Early Sixteenth Century

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Samuel Mareel Making a Room of One’s Own. Place, Space, and Literary Performance in Sixteenth-Century Bruges

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Guilds & Artistic Identities Renaud Adam Living and Printing in Antwerp in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries. A Social Enquiry

83

Angela Glover What Constitutes Sculpture? The Guild Dispute of 1544 over the Saint Gertrude Choir Stalls in Leuven

99

Krista De Jonge Tales of the City. The Image of the Netherlandish Artist in the Sixteenth Century

113

Dialogues between City and Court Elisabeth Neumann Inventing Europe in Antwerp’s 1520 Entry for Charles V. An Erasmian Allegory in the Face of Global Empire

133

Stijn Bussels and Bram Van Oostveldt ‘Restored Behaviour’ and the Performance of the City Maiden in Joyous Entries into Antwerp

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Violet Soen Habsburg Political Culture and Antwerp Defiant. Pacification Strategies of Governors-General during the Dutch Revolt (1566–1586)

167

Olenka Horbatsch Printing the Female Ruler. Nicolas Hogenberg’s Death of Margaret of Austria (1531)

187

The Poetics of History and Mythology Marisa Anne Bass Batavia, the New World, and the Origins of Humankind in Jan Mostaert’s Eve and Four Children 209 Giancarlo Fiorenza Frans Floris and the Poetics of Mythological Painting in Antwerp

229

Tianna Helena Uchacz Mars, Venus, and Vulcan. Equivocal Erotics and Art in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp

245

Literary Practices: License and its Limits Dick E. H. De Boer Fun, Greed, and Popular Culture. Lotteries and Lottery-Rhymes as a Mirror of the Cultural Legacy of the Low Countries’ ‘Long Sixteenth Century’

271

Anne-Laure Van Bruaene State of Play. Rhetorician Drama and the Ambiguities of Censorship in the Early Modern Low Countries

295

Cognitive and Affective Strategies

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Herman Roodenburg Continuities or Discontinuities? Exploring Affective Piety in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries

311

Koenraad Jonckheere The Timanthes Effect. Another Note on the Historical Explanation of Pictures

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Beyond the Low Countries Konrad Ottenheym A Missing Link? Sixteenth-Century Protestant Basilicas by Netherlandish Architects outside the Low Countries

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Nina Lamal and Hans Cools An Italian Voice on the Dutch Revolt. The Work of Francesco Lanario in a European Perspective

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Introduction Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene* Victoria College, University of  Toronto Universiteit Gent

‘Dwelck den mensche aldermeest tot consten verwect?’ (What awakens man most to the arts?) This was the central question when, in 1561, a large rhetorician festival was held in Antwerp with participants from many other towns. The arts in question were the artes liberales, but translated to a vernacular context. ‘Conste’ could also refer to artisanal practice, including artistic practice. Most importantly, the notion implied that knowledge and art should have social value — that they should contribute to society, or to what we would call (urban) culture.1 A book about Netherlandish culture of the sixteenth century indeed assumes that there is such a thing, and that it is useful to think about the various contributions to this volume as each taking part in some larger whole. This is no place to attempt to define anew the concept of culture, though we might point out that the notion itself has drawn significant criticism. The idea of Kultur, with its Germanic nationalist overtones and its implied superiority over Latinate civilisation or Zivilisation long stigmatized a strain of this discourse.2 More recently, the word ‘culture’ has taken on ironic connotations of a conceptually and ethically compromised practice as in phrases like ‘institutional culture’ or ‘political culture’.3 It may be helpful to see the culture of the Low Countries in the sixteenth century in terms of different fields of activity and discourse, much in the way that Pierre Bourdieu imagined it.4 There are the political, the artistic, the religious or spiritual fields, and, less obviously, the sensory, the commercial, and the intellectual fields of metaphysical properties like time and space. But we may also, of course, wish to construct our fields in less conventional ways and to emphasize their many intersections. Victor Turner understands fields as the ‘abstract cultural domains where paradigms are formulated, established, and

The editors would like to thank Amyrose McCue Gill for her invaluable help and assistance with the editing of the chapters and their preparation for publication. 1 Jeroen Vandommele, Als in een spiegel. Vrede, kennis en gemeenschap op het Antwerpse Landjuweel van 1561 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2011), esp. pp.  141–42. On the vernacular, see Joost Keizer and Todd  M. Richardson, The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 2 See Norbert Elias, ‘Sociogenesis of the Difference between Kultur and Zivilisation in German Usage’, The History of Manners, the Civilizing Process, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), I, pp. 3–50. 3 Joshua Rothman, ‘The Meaning of “Culture”’, The New Yorker, 26 December 2014 http://www.newyorker.com/ books/joshua-rothman/meaning-culture [accessed 4 June 2015]. 4 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed.  by Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); and Bourdieu, ‘The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed’, trans. by Richard Nice, Poetics, 12.4–5 (1983), 311–56. *

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. ix-xvi. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.113998

Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

come into conflict.’5 Turner’s definition addresses the different levels of communication in society as well as the development of strategies considered normative. Many of the papers in this collection deal with writings, performances, and artifacts that seem to contravene established paradigms. While the concept of culture is notoriously difficult to define, it is surprising, perhaps, that the historical Low Countries are equally hard to pinpoint. Although the Burgundian-Habsburg rulers were, from the fifteenth century on, committed to the creation of a state with a more or less centralized bureaucracy, the Low Countries remained a conglomerate of large principalities, small seigniories, and powerful cities, all with uncertain borders — especially in the east. The irony is most clear in the expression ‘Seventeen Provinces’ that became current from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards, mainly via the rebel propaganda of the Dutch Revolt. A long line of historians has been unable to identify these seventeen provinces unambiguously — until Robert Stein, following Johan Huizinga’s lead, solved the riddle by pointing out that ‘seventeen’ was not an actual number of lands but a symbolic number referring to unity in diversity.6 This brings us to another paradox: the ‘Netherlands’ only emerged as a strong mobilizing idea when they ceased to exist as a political entity. The efforts in state formation embarked upon by the Burgundian dukes reached a peak under Charles V (1500–58) around the middle of the sixteenth century with the creation of the ‘Burgundian Circle’ in 1548 and with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549. A decade later, a fundamental ecclesiastical reform followed with the installation of new, smaller, and more efficient bishoprics (1559).7 By then, however, the opposition of clergy, nobility, and cities to the centralizing politics of Philip  II (1527–98) was growing fast and, as is well known, political discontent was seriously aggravated by religious controversies and increasing economic difficulties. A civil war soon broke out, now seen as the first phase in a long conflict that went down in history as the Eighty-Years War or the Dutch Revolt (1568–1648).8 The anti-Spanish geuzen party was the first to acknowledge the potential of a nationalist rhetoric built around the ‘fatherland’. Powerful symbols ranged from the title pater patriae for the rebel leader Willem of Orange (1533–84) to the cartographic representation of the Low Countries as a roaring lion in the Leo Belgicus (1583). But before long there were two Netherlands: the Spanish Netherlands in the south that had been reconquered successfully by Philip II’s GovernorGeneral Alexander Farnese (1545–92) and the United Netherlands in the north that engaged in a long war effort against Spain and ended up, rather haphazardly, a republic.9 Contrary to what this turbulent history may suggest, the economy usually went before politics throughout the region: most scholars will agree that what defined the Low Countries were not its borders and its territories but its cities. In the Middle Ages, a dense Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 17. 6 Johan Huizinga, ‘Uit de voorgeschiedenis van ons nationaal besef ’, De Gids 76  (1912), 432–87; Robert Stein, ‘Seventeen. The Multiplicity of a Unity in the Low Countries’, in The Ideology of Burgundy. The Promotion of National Consciousness, 1364–1565, ed. by D’Arcy Jonathan Dacre Boulton and Jan R. Veenstra (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), 223–85. 7 Alastair Duke, ‘The Elusive Netherlands. The Question of National Identity in the Early Modern Low Countries on the Eve of the Revolt’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 119 (2004), 10–38. 8 J. J. Woltjer, Tussen vrijheidsstrijd en burgeroorlog: over de Nederlandse opstand 1555–1580 (Amsterdam: Balans, 1994). 9 Networks, Regions and Nations: Shaping Identities in the Low Countries, 1300–1650, ed. by Robert Stein and Judith Pollmann (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 5

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network of large cities and small towns developed hand in hand with a broad range of textile and luxury industries. In the provinces of Artois, Flanders, Brabant, and Holland in particular, an early market economy flourished. Interaction was strong, not only within the Low Countries but also with other urban regions in northern Italy, the German Empire and England. This led to important movements of people and ideas that were never one way, a phenomenon illustrated, for example, by the history of early Netherlandish painting. Within this network of cities the economic centre of gravity moved from Bruges in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, through Antwerp in the sixteenth century, to Amsterdam in the seventeenth century.10 From 1490 to 1560, Antwerp grew from a town of middling stature to a metropolis of about one hundred thousand inhabitants. In Antwerp, culture was commerce: its art and printing industries catered to much of the Western world and, at the same time, carved a confident self-image celebrating the liberal arts as a means of social and self-improvement. The utopia lasted until the so-called ‘Fall of Antwerp’ in 1585 heralded an exodus of bright minds and skilled artisans — mainly towards the towns of Holland — thus shattering the city’s economy, albeit only temporarily.11 Antwerp is omnipresent in this book, with essays on its painting and printing, its politics, and its public festivals. But other cities also figure prominently, such as Bruges, which is often forgotten in histories of the early modern Low Countries, and smaller centres, such as Leuven or Leiden, that may be more representative of the urban network as a whole. It was precisely the interconnectedness of urban centres — large, middle, and small — rather than their autonomous character, that defined civic culture in the Low Countries.12 More generally, all of the papers have to do in some sense with the city — with concepts of urban community, its internal constituents, and its relation to outside agents and forces. The city, here, is understood in many ways. The very idea of urban space, for example, is dealt with by several of our authors.13 Jelle De Rock discusses the developing city portrait in the Netherlands and its various guises: from profile view to perspectival image to abstract ground plan. The divisions between these types are porous. Our idea of the map as an abstract diagram is epistemologically removed from many sixteenth-century maps, which register a pronounced experiential aspect: the view of the city’s profile from the lowlying sea or land, or an imagined bird’s-eye view of its streets and major buildings. Samuel Mareel treats urban space in a different way. He traces the presence of the Bruges rederijkers (members of the chambers of rhetoric) about the city, noting the way they marked various sites with their performances. It is a ‘tour’ of the urban geography rather than a ‘map’, to use Michel de Certeau’s reductive but still useful binary terms.14 This is also the approach of Stijn Bussels and Bram Van Oostveldt, who discuss successive performances of the Recent syntheses are Wim Blockmans, Metropolen aan de Noordzee. De geschiedenis van Nederland, 1100–1650 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2010); Waarom mensen in de stad willen wonen, 1200–2010, ed.  by Leo Lucassen and Wim Willems (Amsterdam, Bert Bakker: 2010); Nederland stedenland. Continuïteit en vernieuwing, ed. by Ed Taverne, Len de Klerk, Bart Ramakers, and Sebastian Demski (Rotterdam: nai010 uitgevers, 2012); and Gouden eeuwen. Stad en samenleving in de Lage Landen, 1100–1600, ed. by Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Bruno Blondé, and Marc Boone (Ghent: Academia Press, 2016). 11 A recent volume on Antwerp culture is Trading Values in Early Modern Antwerp, ed.  by Christine Göttler, Bart Ramakers, and Joanna Woodall (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 12 See Gouden eeuwen. 13 Peter Arnade, Martha Howell, and Walter Simons, ‘Fertile Spaces: The Productivity of Urban Space in Northern Europe’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32.4 (2002), 515–48. 14 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 118–22. 10

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various toghen or tableaux in the joyous entries into Antwerp that transformed the streets of the city, marking the urban fabric through a series of experiences. Elisabeth Neumann’s essay on the earlier Antwerp entry of Charles V in 1520 places the city — and Antwerp in particular — in the much larger context of the world. Antwerp represents a chief voice of Europe, newly constituted as civilization’s ruling Christian community; a guarantor of peace in a fractious world. In these discussions of entries and dramatic offerings, space and time are invariably connected. Urban space is thus articulated through a narrative that winds its way across the fabric of the city in the course of a few hours — or is played back in memory in much less time, often being reconstituted into a new story.15 Several of our authors instead treat the dialogue between city and court, a key subject in the historiography of the late medieval and early modern Low Countries since Johan Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages.16 Again, the joyous entries were a prime arena for the public negotiation of rights and obligations between these two entities. Olenka Horbatsch’s essay addresses this dynamic obliquely, contrasting the physical monuments to Margaret of Austria (1480–1530) in the cities of Bruges and Mechelen (and Brou) with the circulating prints commemorating Margaret’s death and funeral rites that disseminated court ideology in a non-site-specific manner. These ‘paper monuments’ were nonetheless issued in cities with distinct artistic traditions: the towns of Leiden, Antwerp, and Mechelen were the centres of early print production in the Low Countries. Mechelen, the site of Margaret’s residence and court, was very much an urban centre, expressing Habsburg interests through the strategies of artists and writers who gathered there and operated through the local guilds, chambers of rhetoric, and looser networks of aristocratic patronage. Cities were also centres of publishing. As Renaud Adam observes, printers established their own geography within each city. In Antwerp they were centred around the Kammerpoort. Printers built networks with other craftsmen involved directly or peripherally with the book industry, many of whom were associated with the guild of St Luke, the guild of painters and wood sculptors. Of course, the woodblock carvers (formsnyders) who created the matrices for the woodcuts that illustrated early editions were naturally associated with the St Luke guild, but printers and other craftsmen were drawn under its umbrella, illustrating the strength of the guild model but also its flexibility. The identity of artisanal crafts, of course, was partly established by guild membership — though here there was much grey area. Angela Glover discusses the notion of ‘sculpture’ in sixteenth-century terms as well as the degree to which this activity and product was even an integral notion in the early modern period. The functions that we ascribe to the modern idea of the sculptor were split between beeldsnijders, metselriesnijders, cleynstekers, and schrijnmakers (figural carvers, ornament and miniature architecture carvers, and joiners). The definitions and divisions of these terms could be hotly debated — both on For recent thoughts on urban space and a critique of Michel Foucault’s stable notion of spatial hierarchy, see the introduction by Markus Stock and Nicole Vöhringer in Spatial Practices, Medieval/Modern, ed.  by Stock and Vöhringer (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2014), pp. 7–24; and Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. by Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16 (1986), 22–27. 16 Johan Huizinga, Herfsttij der middeleeuwen. Studie over levens- en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1919). Two more recent exemplary studies are Peter Arnade, Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Margit Thøfner, A Common Art: Urban Ceremonial in Antwerp and Brussels During and After the Dutch Revolt (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2007). 15

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conceptual and legal grounds — in order to defend or dismantle the monopolies of the various guilds. Publishing was also an important medium for establishing the identity of the arts and of artists. Krista De Jonge shows that the notion of the liberal artist (master of the artes liberales) was essentially an urban invention forged by the writings of Cornelis Grapheus (1482–1558), secretary of Antwerp, and of Lodovico Guicciardini (1521–89), Florentine businessman and historian, also resident in the city. Other important contributions to this identity came from books by Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502–50), which were published in Antwerp, and from the writings of Domenicus Lampsonius (1532–99), including his biographical epigrams dedicated to Netherlandish painters, published at Antwerp, and his life of the Liège painter Lambert Lombard (c. 1505–66), published at Bruges. De Jonge also gestures to the programmatic façades of artists’ houses in Antwerp, which refined and disseminated the vision of the intellectual artist within the urban milieu. Time is another issue treated by several of our authors. Marisa Bass discusses the early histories of the Netherlands and its territories by Cornelis Aurelius (c. 1460–1531), Gerard Geldenhouwer (1482–1542), and others, noting the way they situate the Roman colony of Batavia within an encompassing cosmological schema that includes the creation of the world and humanity from Genesis as well as nearly current events from political history and from the explorations of the New World. Here pagan history, Roman mythology, and the Old and New Testaments are linked in a discourse on the primitive and the civilized. Ethan Matt Kavaler addresses the way that biblical time was represented spatially in the carved altarpieces that were celebrated products and exports of the major Netherlandish cities. He posits that the segmentation of represented events into discrete compartments simulated the limits of experiential time, whereas the observer’s view of all the sections simultaneously conveyed the divine perspective on time and history. Kavaler further suggests that such a construction was potentially contentious, since it related to the growing debate over God’s foreknowledge and His foreordination of events. Mythological stories represented by Netherlandish painters are related to larger social and cultural interests by Bass as well as by Giancarlo Fiorenza and Tianna Uchacz. Fiorenza discusses the erotic aspect of these pictures and their allusions to productive generation, a fertile and creative power that could be newly harnessed in the interests of the city. A picture by Frans Floris (c. 1520–70) portraying the Banquet of the Sea Gods was commissioned for Antwerp’s Town Hall, an unprecedented use of this kind of mythological subject in a civic context, as Fiorenza notes. Their relationship to the poetry of Lucas d’Heere (1534–84) and the chambers of rhetoric further situates these paintings and their subjects within an urban setting. But the mythological mode was also pan-European. Works by Floris, Jan Massys (c. 1509–75), and Willem Key (1516–68) relate in their amorous themes and critical concepts to the poetry of Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85) and the Pléiade as well as to painting in Italy and France. Uchacz focuses, in contrast, on a single mythological subject: Mars and Venus Caught in the Web of Vulcan. She treats the theme and its depictions as a medium for regulating erotic desire, situating this dynamic precisely within the cities of the Low Countries. Uchacz locates the centre of this discourse in Antwerp but observes a dialogue that includes painters in other towns such as Haarlem, Mechelen, and Liège. Like Fiorenza, Uchacz relates the pictorial treatment of the subject with its textual handling by the rederijkers, xiii

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suggesting how behaviour guides for young women by Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540), Christophe Plantin (c. 1520–89), and others refine this discourse. Finally, Uchacz insists on the importance of ambiguity in the paintings and their consequent charge to viewers to resolve for themselves the moral problems presented. Clearly, the limits of acceptable subject matter in the visual arts developed as part of an ongoing discourse in which not only painters and print publishers, but also poets, dramatists, and authors of books on ethical behaviour all took part. Anne-Laure Van Bruaene notes a similar practice of censorship in rederijker drama. Control over speech was exercised to a large degree by the chambers themselves, mindful as they were of the boundaries upon which the authorities insisted. While blasphemous and defamatory words were criticized, the rhetorical requirements of drama often demanded that ethically compromised personages speak in character — or, as Van Bruaene puts it, sometimes ‘a good play needed bad language’. Thus, a ‘culture of free debate’ existed within this urban theatre — at least until events forced the hand of the government. This was the case with the inclusion of Lutheran sentiment in the plays of the Ghent competition of 1539, which were subsequently published in that city. And memories of this trouble forced the authorities into an act of pre-censorship prior to the Antwerp landjuweel of 1561. But, for the most part, limits were set by practice and allowed for a good deal of play among the involved parties. A comparable process of control seems to have been exercised over the lottery rhymes discussed by Dick de Boer. Quintessentially urban phenomena, proceeds from lottery competitions were used to finance city fortifications, budget deficits, church costs, and other municipal projects. As with rederijker drama, lottery rhymes might contain heretical or blasphemous assertions, personal defamations, or uncouth language. Boundaries were established through evolving experience as a kind of game among lottery officials, a great variety of authors and contributors, and both civic and ecclesiastical authorities. De Boer also highlights the performative nature of the lottery competitions: lot-drawings could take days or even weeks and thus layered market life with a remarkable soundscape. Nina Lamal and Hans Cools’s paper on Francesco Lanario’s history of the Dutch Revolt deals with matters of censorship in another way. Lanario’s text was repeatedly translated and edited for publication in different countries; in each successive edition, certain potentially offensive or tendentious aspects were modified for their new audiences. Here it is publishers and translators, not governments, that exercised a form of pre-censorship. Their motives — to attract the largest readership — were thus more commercial than political, though of course no easy divide can be drawn. Communication and negotiation between city and court are treated by several authors. Violet Soen discusses the strategies that the Habsburg court developed for dealing with insurgency in the cities during the first two decades after the political disorder occasioned by the iconoclastic riots of 1566. These twenty years provided a space for experimenting with different policies that had the goal of reconciliation but also of Catholic hegemony. Antwerp was recognized as key in this process: Philip II and his governess Margaret of Parma (1522–86) promulgated edicts and laws, but room was left to local officials like the magistrate of Antwerp for manoeuvring within the stipulated rules. As noted above, Neumann along with Bussels and Van Oostveldt address the joyous entries of the Emperor (in his capacity as the Duke of Brabant) into Antwerp, a xiv

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ritual with binding legal force that was also an ideal opportunity for pressing a favourable narrative of power on everyone in attendance. Bussels and Van Oostveldt stress the importance of performance — the ritualized enactments of allegorical vignettes and audience attendance — as a process that effectively fixes ideological values and hierarchal relations in the minds of beholders. The psychology of responses to images and texts occupies two other authors, Herman Roodenburg and Koenraad Jonckheere, who search for discontinuities in techniques of engaging viewers and readers through their emotions. Roodenburg wonders whether the traditional Christ-centred piety of the late Middle Ages suddenly ended in the sixteenth century — and, if so, with what consequences? Identifying a more prevalent private sphere of religious contemplation — a ‘construction of inwardness’ addressed by pictures and texts — he points to a recognized need to engage the heightened emotions of theatre audiences. Like Bussels and Van Oostveldt as well as De Boer, Roodenburg emphasizes the importance of theatre as performance — a sensory experience — rather than as disembodied text. Complementarily, Jonckheere relies on the psychological effects of expectations met and, more importantly, denied. The omission of certain critical details in traditional painted subjects was conspicuous, he argues, and invited reflection on their absence. Breaching the pattern of expectation could be jarring both cognitively and emotionally, and when absences concerned iconographic features that were much disputed at the time, paintings might become fields for debate. Two essays focus on Netherlandish events and artefacts seen from a foreign perspective. After all, due to their central geographic location, their strong dependence on international luxury trades, and their complex political realities, the culture of the Low Countries was heavily defined by what happened outside their unstable borders; concurrently, it influenced broader European culture in unexpected ways.17 Lamal and Cools investigate the history of the Dutch Revolt, which Italian writer Francesco Lanario (c. 1589–c. 1624) composed while resident in the Spanish Low Countries. The Italian’s rather impartial stance and his rhetorical models were both highly unusual. Lamal and Cools follow the successive printings of Lanario’s account, from its initial publication in Antwerp in 1615 through later editions in Paris, Madrid, and Cologne, in order to chart — as noted above — the accommodations to differing regional and confessional audiences that editors and translators imposed. Lanario’s text thus became a malleable document that was adjusted to suit the expected needs and prejudices of its varied readers across Europe. Konrad Ottenheym also sees regions outside of the Netherlands as offering a valuable corrective to studies that focus too narrowly on the Low Countries themselves. Ottenheym’s subject is Protestant church architecture, and the geographical area he brings into our discussion is the Baltic. Although the recognized model for Netherlandish Protestant churches is the centrally planned building, numerous and important longitudinal (or basilican) structures were built for Protestant worshipers in the sixteenth century — but in the north of Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. A  great many of these churches were constructed and decorated by expatriate Netherlanders, who had left their own cities due to war and lack of commissions. Indeed, the Baltic cities and courts might be seen as a kind For a recent perspective on Antwerp’s role in the international economy of the sixteenth century, see Jeroen Puttevils, Merchants and Trading in the Sixteenth Century: The Golden Age of Antwerp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015).

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of laboratory for developing solutions to the problem of a distinctively Protestant church. These solutions were later reintroduced to the cities of the Netherlands — much like Hendrik de Keyser’s longitudinal Westerkerk and Zuiderkerk, two of Amsterdam’s principal churches. This volume comprises a selection of the papers delivered at the conference ‘Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century’, held by the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at Victoria College in the University of Toronto on 19–20 October 2012. The conference was organized by Professor Ethan Matt Kavaler of the University of Toronto and Professor Anne-Laure Van Bruaene of the University of Ghent. The participants represented research traditions from both sides of the Atlantic and came from several disciplines: urban history, book history, literary studies, art history, and anthropology. All authors were explicitly asked to adopt an urban perspective in rethinking their material and in placing textual and visual expressions in their historical contexts. Through these interdisciplinary studies, we hope to offer new insights into the culture of the Low Countries during this period and to suggest useful perspectives on that of other European regions.

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Space & Time

From Generic Image to Individualized Portrait The Pictorial City View in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries* Jelle De Rock Ghent University

‘Fra tutti quei piaceri che la deletteuole & artificiosa pittura ha in se no v’ce nisuna che piu io stimi: che la descrittione di luochi’ (‘Among all the joys that the delightful and ingenious art of painting has to offer, there is not one that I hold in higher esteem than the representation of cities’).1 These words were written in 1553 by the Antwerp artist Anton van den Wyngaerde (1525–71). Shortly thereafter, he entered the service of King Philip II of Spain and dedicated the remaining years of his life to the ‘description’ of the major cities of the Iberian Peninsula. His refined town portraits combine observation and projection in a delicate and artistic fashion (Figure 1). At the same time, another Netherlandish topographer in royal service, Jacob van Deventer, meticulously surveyed and ‘described’ the towns of the Low Countries in a quasi-cartographic manner (Figure 2). This peculiar synchronism is indicative of the complex and eclectic process that occurred throughout early modern Europe to transform the generic and anonymous image of the city into an individualized town portrait. Many scholars have drawn a parallel between the development of the human portrait as an artistic genre and the emancipation of the pictorial city view. Jessica Maier states that at the dawn of the sixteenth century cities — just like people — ‘were increasingly thought of as unique entities and were represented as such, with much greater emphasis on their individual features’.2 As lifelikeness and optical accuracy became criteria of growing importance, the ‘art’ of picturing the city came to be increasingly entangled with the blossoming science of geometry and the representational language of cartography. However, this rapprochement between art and science turns out to be not as straightforward as has often been assumed: it by no means resulted in a linear or teleological process towards a widespread scientific and geometrical perception and representation of urban space in sixteenth-century society. This paper was made possible within the IAP framework VII/26 ‘City & Society in the Low Countries’ of the Belgian Science Policy (http://www.cityandsociety.be). 1 Mentioned in a cartouche of Van de Wyngaerde’s View of Genova (1552) and quoted in Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, ‘The Spanish Views of Anton van den Wyngaerde’, Master Drawings, 7:4 (1969), p. 393. 2 Jessica Maier, ‘A “True Likeness”: The Renaissance City Portrait’, Renaissance Quarterly, 65:3  (2012), p.  720. For this comparison with the portrait genre, see also Jan Grieten and Paul Huvenne, ‘Antwerp portayed’, in Antwerp, Story of a Metropolis. 16th–17th Century, ed. by Jan van der Stock (Gent: Snoeck-Ducaju, 1993), pp. 69–77. *

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 3-30. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.113999

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Fig. 1: Anthon van den Wyngaerde, View of Brussels (detail), drawing, 1558, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Inv. no. WA.C.LG.IV.46b. © Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Hybridity — that is, the crossbreeding of different modes of representing the city, both traditional and innovative, pictorial and geometric — was key to the commercial chorography of early modern Europe. The public, consisting of pilgrims, armchair travellers, merchants and collectors fancied city views that were accurate, lifelike, compelling, and versatile; a demand that resulted in ‘the sympathetic interaction of scientific technology and artistic endeavor’.3 By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the highly urbanized Low Countries boasted a strong pictorial and humanist cartographic tradition, which makes the region well-suited to teasing out the complicated ‘emancipation process’ of the pictorial city view. This paper will discuss the broad chronology of this process and will shed light on the major actors, aspirations, innovations, and traditions by which it was driven and inspired.

John  A. Pinto, ‘Origins and Development of the Ichnographic City Plan’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 35:1 (1976), p. 50.

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Fig. 2: Jacob van Deventer, Plan of Brussels (detail), drawing, c. 1555, Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels, Department Maps and Plans, Ms. 22.090 (15). © Royal Library of Belgium.

Towards an Individualized Town Portrait At the end of the fifteenth century, the city had evolved to a fully-fledged iconographical subject, detached from a principal religious or historiographical narrative.4 Early modern Europe massively embraced the pictorial representation of its cities. Whereas, from the 4 Bernd Roeck, ‘Die Säkularisierung der Stadtvedute in der Neuzeit’, in Bild und Wahrnehmung der Stadt, ed.  by Ferdinand Opll (Linz: Österreichischer Arbeitskreis für Stadtgeschichtsforschung, 2004), pp. 189–98.

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period before 1490, only roughly thirty autonomous Western city portraits have survived, this number grew exponentially during the following decades.5 Even though late medieval Netherlandish panel paintings, tapestries, and miniatures boast a rich tradition of pictorial cityscapes in the background of religious scenes, battle scenes and the calendaria of books of hours, the emancipation of the early ­Netherlandish town portrait lagged behind that of the cities of the Holy Roman Empire and the Italian peninsula. Notwithstanding their famed ‘realism’ and attachment to detail, most fifteenth-century Netherlandish city views were completely fictitious paste-ups, assembling all kinds of urban architecture drawn from life.6 Despite the fervid attempts of modern historians to identify particular locations, most medieval artists did not intend to depict a specific town.7 This is not to ignore the fact that, at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, Flemish and Brabant panel painters occasionally incorporated clearly identifiable city views in their background. Hans Memling, for instance, inserted a relatively accurate veduta of the Bruges Kraanplaats in his Saint John Altarpiece (1474–79), while the Masters of the Legend of Saint Lucy and the Legend of Saint Ursula (c. 1480–1510) used a selective and highly idealized view of the Bruges skyline as a trademark.8 Furthermore, the Master of the View of Saint Gudula employed various Brussels churches and street views as settings for his biblical scenes (1475–1500), while Dirk Bouts’s famous Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament (1464–67) offers a glimpse of the Leuven city hall.9 Around 1500, the members of the Mechelen Guild of Saint George were portrayed against the skyline and hinterland of their city (Figure 3). The town also figures in the background of a panel representing an episode in the life of Saint Rumbold (c. 1500), the city’s patron saint.10 More or less at the same time, several Antwerp masters (or their patrons?) chauvinistically incorporated a view of the busy harbour town as seen from the left bank of the River Scheldt in religious altarpieces.11 In the Northern Netherlands, the iconic bell tower of the Utrecht cathedral adorns several painted townscapes, while the Hilary Ballon and David Friedman, ‘Portraying the City in Early Modern Europe: Measurement, Representation, and Planning’, in The History of Cartography, ed. by David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 3:1, pp. 680–705. 6 Craig Harbison has associated this ‘realism of particulars’ with a ‘model-book mentality’. Throughout late medieval European painting, artists were constantly inspired by their environment, yet seldom had the ambition to represent a specific town or landscape. See Harbison, ‘Fact, Symbol, Ideal: Roles for Realism in Early Netherlandish Painting’, in Petrus Christus in Renaissance Bruges. An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. by Marian M. Ainsworth (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), pp. 21–34. 7 The oeuvre of Jan van Eyck in particular has been the subject of this positivistic approach: R. Maere, ‘Over het afbeelden van bestaande gebouwen in het schilderwerk van Vlaamsche Primitieven’, in De Kunst der Nederlanden, I (1931), pp. 201–12; F. Lafenestre and E. Richtenberger, Le Musée Nationale du Louvre (Paris, 1893), p. 287; A. Heins, ‘La Plus ancienne vue de Gand: Le Carrefour de la rue courte du Jour’, Bulletijn van de Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent, 14 (1906), pp. 115–26; and P. Schwarzmann, ‘La Ville de Stein am Rhein à l’arriere-plan dans La Vierge au Chancelier Rolin de van Eyck?’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 151 (1990), pp. 104–08. For the Master of Flémalle see J. Duchesne-Guillemin, ‘On the Cityscape of the Mérode Altarpiece’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 11 (1976), 129–31. 8 For a brief quantitative and qualitative analysis of these Bruges towerscapes, see Jelle De Rock, ‘The Image of the City Quantified: The Serial Analysis of Pictorial Representations of Urbanity in Early Netherlandish Art (1420–1520)’, in Portraits of the City: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Study of Representations of Urban Landscape, ed. by Jan Dumolyn, Katrien Lichtert, and Maximiliaan Martens (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 67–82. 9 Les Primitifs flamands et leur temps, ed. by Brigitte de Patoul and Roger Van Schoute (Bruxelles: Renaissance du Livre, 2007), pp. 386–87, 539–43. 10 Pieter Verhoeven, ‘Repertoires of Involvement and Distinction. Elite Identity in Mechelen ca. 1500’, in L’Identité au pluriel. Jeux et enjeux des appartenances autour des anciens Pays-Bas xiv e–xviii e siècles, ed. by Violet Soen, Yves Junot, and Florian Mariage (Lille: Revue du Nord, 2014), pp. 165–78. 11 For some illustrations, see Rutger Tijs, Antwerpen: historisch portret van een stad (Tielt: Lannoo, 2001). See also De Rock, ‘The City Portrayed. Patterns of Continuity and Change in the Antwerp Renaissance City View’, in Antwerp in the Renaissance, ed. by Bruno Blondé, Bert De Munck, and Maarten van Dijck, forthcoming. 5

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Fig. 3: Master of the Guild of St. George, Detail of Guild members with Mechelen towerscape, oil on panel, c. 1500, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. © KIK-IRPA, Brussels.

Haarlem town hall figures in the background of a late fifteenth-century Ecce Homo panel.12 Nevertheless, the total number of early Netherlandish topographical urban views remains rather scanty. Scholars such as Dirk De Vos and Walter Prevenier were amazed by the relative absence of the immediate and specific urban reality in early Netherlandish art, especially when compared to the countless city portraits of Italian and German cities that are still preserved in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century frescos and panel paintings of patron saints and hagiographies.13 As early as 1280, Cimabue had evoked the idea of ‘Italia’ in the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi by depicting distinctive Roman landmarks such as the Coliseum, the Pantheon, Saint Peter’s Basilica, and the Torre delle Milizie. From the Trecento onward, numerous Italian towns were portrayed as small-scale models in the protective presence of a patron saint, while in the fifteenth century, recognizable city views were depicted with varying degrees of topographical accuracy by painters such as Benozzo Gozzoli (Arezzo, Montefalco), Domenico Ghirlandaio (­Florence, San Gimignano), 12 Monogrammist AM, Ecce Homo, c.  1480, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. See Vroege Hollanders. Schilderkunst van de late middeleeuwen, ed.  by Friso Lammertse and Giltaij Jeroen (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2008), pp.  127–29. For the Utrecht cathedral tower, see Marieke van Vlierden, Utrecht. Een hemel op aarde (Utrecht and Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1988). 13 Dirk De Vos, Hans Memling. The Complete Oeuvre (Antwerp: Ludion, 1994), pp.  39–40; and Walter Prevenier, ‘Culture et groupes sociaux dans les villes des anciens Pays-Bas au moyen âge’, in Les Pays-Bas bourguignons. Histoire et institutions. Mélanges André Uyttebrouck, ed. by Jean-Marie Duvosquel, Jacques Nazet, and André Vanrie (Brussels: Archives et Bibliothèques de Belgique, 1996), p. 358.

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Andrea Mantegna (Mantua), Jacopo da Sellaio (Florence), Sandro Botticelli (Florence), Pinturicchio (Ancona, Siena), and Francesco Francia (Bologna).14 From approximately 1480 onward, Italian engravers such as Francesco Rosselli (active in Florence, Rome, and perhaps Naples) and Jacopo de’ Barbari (active in Venice) would play a crucial role in the promotion of city portraits as an autonomous pictorial category.15 Late medieval German painting also boasted a strong tradition of urban iconography. As early as 1411, the Master of the Small Passion decorated a predella depicting the martyrdom of Saint Ursula with a primitive view of Cologne. During the following decades, many German-speaking towns were immortalized in the background of religious altarpieces, including Lüneberg (1445), Nördlingen (1462), Rothenburg (1466), Vienna (1469–80), Passau (1475), Nuremberg (c. 1480), Lübeck (1481), Bamberg (c. 1483), Würzburg (c. 1490) and Zürich (c. 1500).16 German civic culture played an important role in the development of the first printed town views in urban and world chronicles. In 1476, a woodcut of the Cologne skyline adorned the first edition of Werner Rolevinck’s Fasciculus temporum. The same city also figures several times in the 1499 Koelhoffschen Chronik.17 Hartmann Schedel’s famous Liber cronicarum or Weltchronik, first printed in Nuremberg in 1493, contains no less than 123 printed city views (even though some generic cityscapes are used repeatedly to evoke different cities).18 Likewise, Bernardino da Firenze’s Le bellezze et chasati di Firenze (c. 1500) contains a woodcut of Florence’s major monuments that functioned as a ‘visual encomium’ or praise for the city.19 Apparently, the increasing number of printed city portraits was closely entangled with the growing popularity of urban chronicles and city encomia. It is a communis opinio that the cities of fifteenth-century Germany, Switzerland, and Italy embraced this literary genre by far the most fervently.20 Even though the Netherlandish cities produced a wide array of historiographical works, such as regional Lucia Nuti, Ritratti di città. Visione e memoria tra Medioevo e Settecento (Marseilles: Marsilio, 1996); G. A. Vergani, ‘Tra simbolo e realtà: immagini di città dal Duecento all’inizio del Quattrocento’, in La rappresentazione della città nella pittura italiana, ed. by P. de Vecchi and G. A. Vergani (Milan: Silvano, 2003), pp. 51–77; Felicity Ratté, Picturing the City in Medieval Italian Painting ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), esp. pp.  91–117; and J.  Steinhoff, ‘Reality and Ideality in Sienese Renaissance Cityscapes’, in Renaissance Siena: Art in Context, ed.  by L.  A. Jenkens (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2005), pp. 21–45. 15 David Friedman, ‘“Fiorenza”: Geography and Representation in a Fifteenth Century City View’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 64:1 (2001), 56–77; and Jürgen Schulz, ‘Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography before the Year 1500’, The Art Bulletin, 60:3 (1978), 425–74. 16 Das Bild der Stadt in der Neuzeit 1400–1800, ed. by Wolfgang Behringer and Bernd Roeck (Munich: Beck, 1999), pp. 125–423; and Hartmut Boockman, Die Stadt im Späten Mittelalter (Munich: Beck, 1986). Examples include Lüneberg (Hans Borneman, The Punishment of Aegeas, 1445, St  Nicolaskirche), Nördlingen (Friedrich Herlin, High Altar, 1462, St  Georgkirche), Rothenburg (Friedrich Herlin, The Saint Jacob’s Wing of the High Altar, 1466, St  Jacobskerk), Vienna (Anonymous, Flight into Egypt, Schotten Altarpiece, c.  1475, Schottenkirche), Melk (H.  Eckl, Saint Catherine, 1475, Abbey of Melk), Nuremberg (Anonymous, Krell Altar, before 1483, St Lorenzkirche), Tallinn (Hermen Rode, Altarpiece for the Confraternity of the Schwarzhaüpter, 1481, St Nicolaikerk), Bamberg (Wolfgang Katzheimer the Elder, The Parting of the Apostles, c. 1483, Historisches Museum), and Zürich (Hans Leu the Elder, Series of Panels with Patron Saints, c. 1500, Schweizerisches Landesmuseum). 17 Yvonne Leiverkus, Köln. Bilder einer spätmittelalterlichen Stadt (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2005), illus. 1–13. 18 The woodcuts in the Schedelsche Weltchronik were made by the Nuremberg painters Wilhelm Pleydenwurff and Michaël Wolgemut. For a recent study, see The Nuremberg Chronicle and Its Readers: The Reception of Hartmann Schedel’s ‘Liber cronicarum’ (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 19 For the term ‘visual encomium’, see Thomas Frangenberg, ‘Chorographies of Florence. The Use of City Views and City Plans in the Sixteenth Century’, Imago Mundi, 46 (1994), 41–64 (p. 44). 20 Robert Stein states that this observation might have been biased by the impact of the extraordinary repertory, Chroniken der deutschen Städte, initiated in 1859. See Robert Stein, ‘Selbstverständnis oder Identität? Städtische Geschichtsschreibung als Quelle für die Identitätsforschung’, in Memoria, Communitas, Civitas. Mémoire et conscience urbaines en occident à la fin du Moyen Âge, ed. by Hanno Brand, Pierre Monet, and Martial Staub (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2003), pp. 181–202. 14

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chronicles and individual memory books, the urban auto-historiographical tradition of Ursprungschroniken, Ratschroniken, and other official historiographical annotations appears to have been remarkably feeble in the late medieval Low Countries. Despite the explicit urban particularism of the major Brabantine and, especially, Flemish towns, municipal governments and local elites were hardly inclined to support an original historiography devoted to their own city. The majority of Netherlandish chronicles went beyond the local level in favour of the regional or dynastic history of the county or duchy.21 After all, the political constellation in which Netherlandish cities were embedded differed considerably from the relative autonomy of the German Freie Städte and Reichstädte or the de facto independence of the Italian city states. It seems that, owing to the emergent ducal centralism, the mental and political radius of the Netherlandish urban elites increasingly expanded towards the regional level. This might explain the limited presence of Flemish, Brabant, and Dutch city portraits in both late medieval urban iconography and literature. For that matter, it is not insignificant that two of the few individualized city views that were made in the late medieval Low Countries depict the small town of Mechelen, an isolated urban seigneury trapped between the county of Flanders and the duchy of Brabant, where one of the earliest ‘genuine’ urban chronicles22 in the Low Countries was composed.23 Apparently, the complex socio-political and institutional character of the city — combined with its status as the judicial capital of the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands from 1473 onward — inspired urban elites to situate their identity and status, at least partially, at the local level. Another exceptionally rich tradition of urban portraits flourished around 1500 in the booming port city of Antwerp. Here, the emergent mercantile elite showed little political ambition and remained for a long time relatively separated from the ruling class.24 For these merchants, the city with its harbour — immortalized in early modern altarpieces and woodcuts — was a quintessential component of their existence and identity. As the new commercial gateway of the Low Countries, Antwerp would play a prime role in the ­advancement of the Netherlandish town view. Between Tradition and Innovation: The Emancipation of Chorography The descriptive mode and growing degree of accuracy that marked late medieval and early modern images of cities has inspired scholars to discern the birth of a proper ‘urban cartography’ around 1500. The first independent city views are commonly understood as products of the same ‘mapping impulse’ that generated the regional, national and

Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, ‘S’imaginer le passé et le présent: Conscience historique et identité urbaine en Flandre à la fin du Moyen Âge’, in Memoria, Communitas, Civitas, pp. 167–80. This observation inspired Robert Stein to state that urban historiographical production did not necessarily correspond to a strong local self-awareness, not even in German towns (Stein, ‘Selbstverständnis oder Identität?’, p. 200). 22 By ‘genuine’ urban chronicle we mean a (chronological) historiographical description that focuses on local, urban events and persons. 23 For ‘Die cronike van die scoone ende heerlijke stadt van Mechelen’, see Bram Caers, ‘Layered Text Formation in Urban Chronicle Manuscripts. The Case of Late-Medieval Mechelen’, in Between Stability and Transformation. Textual Traditions in the Medieval Netherlands, ed. by Youri Desplenter, Renée Gabriël, and Johan Oosterman (Hilversum: Verloren, 2016). 24 Hugo Soly, ‘Het “verraad” der 16de-eeuwse burgerij: een mythe? Enkele beschouwingen betreffende het gedragspatroon der 16de-eeuwse Antwerpse ondernemers’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 86 (1978), 261–80. 21

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world maps of Renaissance Europe. A number of different factors incited a ‘cartographic fervour’ throughout Europe. These included technical innovations such as the Ptolemaic revival, the development of triangulation and of other surveying techniques, and the rapid dissemination of the art of printing. In addition, exceptional historical events (such as the discovery of the New World) and socio-political transformations (such as the emergence of a central state, the propagation of an increasingly rigid legal discourse on private property, and the military revolution that entailed new ways of warfare) contributed to the demand for accurate mapping. The mastery of linear perspective and the legacy of the classical geography of Ptolemy thoroughly changed the way in which space was conceived and represented — at least in the minds and practices of a select group of intellectuals, scientists and surveyors. The expanding sensitivity to the visual that swept early modern Europe led to the growing of graphic descriptions as truthful representations of the surrounding reality and, more specifically, of the city.25 The depiction of measuring instruments, the portrayal of a surveying artist and the prolific inscriptions referring to the town view as ad vivum or conterfeytsel (‘counterfeit’, literally based on a factual reality) undoubtedly added to the truth claims of early modern representations of the city. This development provoked Cesare de Seta to state that at the end of the fifteenth century, for the first time since antiquity, Ptolemy (geometry) had superseded Heredotus (historiography).26 Along the same lines, Naomi Miller has recently highlighted three codices of Ptolemy’s Geography produced in Florence during the third quarter of the fifteenth century as ‘an essential link between medieval and modern modes of mapping’.27 In her opinion, the Ptolemaic maps of Italian and Eastern cities that figure as illustrations in these codices constitute a bridge between the reductionist and highly empirical medieval views and the more rationally ‘measured’ ones that were conceived at the end of the fifteenth century by Francesco Rosselli, Jacopo de’ Barbari, and Leonardo da Vinci.28 Miller tends to overestimate, however, the impact of these codices, presenting them as a kind of ‘missing link’ in a linear and ongoing process of rationalization and ‘scientification’. The majority of early modern city views, however, remained predominantly pictorial, and advanced orthogonal projections (such as Leonardo’s plan of Imola, c. 1502) remained exceptional in sixteenth-century Italy.29 Early town portraits are often confusingly referred to as city ‘maps’, even though the majority are hybrid artefacts that contain few ‘hard’ cartographic features — a semantic confusion that had already troubled early modern writers.30 Only recently scholars have seriously contested the prevailing model of historical progression that views the Renaissance as Lyle Massey, ‘Framing and Mirroring the World’, in The Renaissance World, ed.  by John Jeffries Martin (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 51–68; and Martin Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Modernity and Identity, ed. by Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992). 26 ‘Zum ersten Mal hat Ptolemäus den Vorrang vor Herodot’, cited in Cesare de Seta, ‘Eine Deutscher Städteikonographie in Europäischer Perspektive’, in Das Bild der Stadt, p. 11. 27 Naomi Miller, Mapping the City. The Language and Culture of Cartography in the Renaissance (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), p. xv. 28 Miller, Mapping the City, p.  29. For Rosselli’s lost view of Rome, dated c.  1485–90, see Jessica Maier, ‘Francesco Rosselli’s Lost View of Rome: An Urban Icon and its Progeny’, Art Bulletin, 94:3 (2012), 395–411. Around 1502, Leonardo da Vinci devised the orthogonal plan of Imola (Museo Vinciano, Vinci). 29 Marco Folin, ‘Piante di città nell’Italia di antico regime. Uno strumento di conoscenza analitico-operativa’, in Rappresentare la città. Topografie urbane nell’Italia di antico regime, ed. by Folin (Roma: Diabasis, 2010), pp. 10–36. 30 The very similar perspective plans of Bruges (Marcus Gheeraerts, 1562) and Ypres (Thévelin and Destrée, 1564) are respectively called charte (‘map’) and pourtraicture ende descriptie (‘portrait and description’). See below. 25

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a period of decisive and rapid change in cartography (as in almost every other aspect of Western history).31 In 2007, David Woodward questioned the well-established idea of a Renaissance ‘cartographic revolution’ by stressing the considerable degree of continuity between medieval and early modern ways of representing and surveying (urban) space. Traditional medieval techniques of surveying and describing the city both orally and textually remained in vogue throughout the sixteenth century, whereas ‘qualitative’ pictorial city views continued to outnumber ‘quantitative’ planimetric maps.32 John Pinto has remarked that even highly sophisticated city views (such as Augustin Hischvogel’s orthogonal plan of Vienna, 1552) simultaneously embraced the newest surveying and projection techniques and adhered to a long-standing tradition of circular city plans that can be traced back to the eighth century.33 The persistent historiographical orthodoxy of a vast Renaissance scientific revolution that led to a linear increase of empirical accuracy and detail has been recently debunked by Keith Lilley. By means of a case study that made use of modern GIS (Geographic Information Systems) tools, he was able to reveal that fourteenth-century cartographic projects were not by definition less accurate than early modern ones. Nathalie Bouloux has made a similar observation, as she discerns already a burgeoning cartographic awareness in Trecento Italy.34 Dan Smail has pointed to the co-existence of a variety of socially biased ‘imaginary cartographies’ in fourteenth-century Marseille. He distinguishes various linguistic templates that arranged the representation of urban space in an oral or textual manner. Only gradually did the more rational notarial template — based on the urban street grid — prevail, enabling planimetric town plans to grow in popularity.35 Marco Folin, in his turn, has drawn attention to a longue durée functional continuity, stating that the majority of Italian Renaissance city views served an ideological or commemorative purpose that did not fundamentally differ from that of Trecento frescos such as Lorenzetti’s Buon governo in the Sienese Palazzo Pubblico. In his opinion, most early modern ‘chorographers’ did not pursue a geometric representation per se, but applied scientific measuring techniques as a welcome help in constructing a convincing depiction of the city.36 Throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, the portrayal of cities remained predominantly the terrain of the artist rather than of the surveyor. Ptolemy already distinguished the artistic skills needed by the ‘chorographer’ — literally the ‘describer of places’ — from the mathematical abilities of the geographer, even though their overall objective — the scientific study of the world and its constituent parts — is more or less the same. This professional A classic example of this traditional approach is P. Harvey, The History of Topographical Maps: Symbols, Pictures and Surveys (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980). 32 Woodward, ‘Cartography and the Renaissance: Continuity and Change’, in The History of Cartography, pp.  7–9. A famous example of a popular written town description or ‘chorography’ at the end of the sixteenth century is John Stow’s Survey of London, first published in 1598. 33 Pinto, ‘Origins and Development’, pp. 49–50. 34 Keith Lilley, ‘Geography’s Medieval History: A Forgotten Enterprise?’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 1:2 (2011), 147–62; Mapping Medieval Geographies: Geographical Encounters in the Latin West and Beyond, 300–1600, ed.  by Keith Lilley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Nathalie Bouloux, Culture et savoirs géographiques dans l’Italie du xive siècle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002). 35 Dan L. Smail, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseilles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 36 Folin, ‘De l’usage pratico-politique des images de villes (Italie, xve–xvie siècle)’, in Villes de Flandre et d’Italie (xiiie–xvie siècle). Les Enseignements d’une comparaison, ed.  by Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan and Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 259–80. 31

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dichotomy was further corroborated by humanist scholars, including Petrus Apianus and Antoine de Pinet. Ptolemy’s heritage helped significantly to define and legitimize ‘chorography’ as an autonomous discipline between art and science.37 In practice, the majority of chorographers were artists with a varying degree of geometrical skills: the Bruges painter Lancelot Blondeel, for instance, made several hydrographic designs for the Bruges area, whereas the artist Pieter Pourbus painted maps of the Dunes Abbey (1580) and the Bruges Region (1571).38 Marcus Gheeraerts (most famous for his perspective plan of Bruges, 1562) had in 1516 registered with the Bruges guild of painters and image-makers, while the Amsterdam painter and engraver Cornelis Anthonisz. fashioned in 1538 the first bird’s-eye view of his city, in addition to various regional maps and a series of woodcuts representing the counts and countesses of Holland. Also Joris Hoefnagel and Anton van den Wyngaerde, the famous portraitists of European cities, had received artistic training.39 One of the few exceptions was Jacob van Deventer, imperial geographer and author of over 250 Netherlandish town views, who started around 1520 to study medicine and mathematics at the University of Leuven and soon took a great interest in surveying and cartography (Figure 2).40 The spread of scientific measuring techniques such as polygonometry and trigonometry undoubtedly enabled the fabrication of more daring bird’s-eye views and orthogonal maps with an increasing degree of cartographic accuracy.41 Bram ­Vannieuwenhuyze georeferenced and compared Jacob van Deventer’s orthogonal plan (c. 1555) and Braun-Hogenburg’s perspective plan of Brussels (1572) with the parcel plan of W. B. Craen (1835) and concluded that the early modern renderings of the street grid do not fall dramatically short of the nineteenth-century standard of accuracy.42 Nevertheless, most early modern chorographies still contained many elisions and inconsistencies, even though according to Hillary Ballon and David Friedman this did not necessarily affect their persuasiveness: ‘Absent an objective standard of verisimilitude or any possibility of verification, the authority of a map was ultimately based on its fidelity to the pictorial tradition […] rather than on the accuracy with which it registered the physical reality of the city itself ’.43 Perhaps even more crucial was the slow diffusion of ‘cartographic literacy’ among a wide audience: save for a small circle of humanists and technicians, the majority of sixteenth-century patrons and buyers still preferred the familiar pictorial city ‘portrait’ to the more abstract geometric town ‘map’.

Richard L. Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World (1493–1793) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 11–13; Woodward, ‘Cartography’, p. 8. 38 Bruges and the Renaissance. Memling to Pourbus (Notes), ed.  by Maximiliaan  P.  J. Martens (New York: Stichting Kunstboek & Ludion, 1998), cat. 85–86, 113–15. A map of the hydrography of Romboutswerwe (cat. 114), made in 1578 by Pieter Pourbus, bears the inscription that it was made ‘naer de conste van[de] chorographie’ (‘according to the art of chorography’). 39 David Buisseret, ‘Art and Cartography as two Complementary Means of Description in Central Europe. 1400–1700’, in Met passer en penseel. Brussel en het oude hertogdom Brabant in beeld (Brussels: La Renaissance du Livre, 2000), pp. 13–19. 40 Bram Vannieuwenhuyze, ‘Les Plans de villes de Jacques de Deventer (xvie siècle). État de la question et pistes de recherche’, Revue du Nord, 94:396 (2012), 613–33. 41 Ballon and Friedman, ‘Portraying the City’, pp. 685–86. 42 Vannieuwenhuyze compared the map of 1572 with a plan by W. B. Craen from 1835. See Bram Vannieuwenhuyze, ‘Brussel, de ontwikkeling van een middeleeuwse stedelijke ruimte’, (unpublished doctoral thesis, Ghent University, 2008), pp. 50–52. 43 Ballon and Friedman, ‘Portraying the City’, p. 691. 37

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The First Autonomous Profile Views As the rising economic gateway of the Low Countries and a blossoming centre of humanist print culture, the Brabantine city of Antwerp played a pioneering role in the creation and dissemination of both painted and printed town views, even though this observation may be distorted by the incomplete preservation of the urban iconography of other Netherlandish cities.44 By the beginning of the sixteenth century, Antwerp had become what Peter Burke called a ‘heterogenetic’ centre par excellence: a place that both abandons and reinvents traditions, absorbs exterior influences, and generates new ‘states of mind’.45 At the end of the fifteenth century, Antwerp boasted a relatively strong tradition of urban iconography. Around 1500, the image of its busy wharfs and its iconic crane became a recurrent theme in several panel paintings, book illuminations and even a carved wooden altarpiece.46 The emphasis of the first Antwerp town views on the logistical potency of the city is revealing for its mercantile mind-set, which glorified the splendour and benefits of the town as a community of commerce.47 This focus on the shoreline as seen from the left bank of the Scheldt persisted throughout the first half of the sixteenth century. In fact, the composition and viewpoint of the first autonomous printed views bear close resemblance to the painted cityscapes in late fifteenth-century altarpieces. Unlike many early Italian town depictions, such as Francesco Rosselli’s oblique view of Florence (c. 1480) and Jacopo de’ Barbari’s bird’s-eye representation of Venice (1500), the first printed Netherlandish chorographies opted for a profile view. Lucia Nuti has labelled the profile view as e­ ndemic to the sea-based and flat Low Countries. The low viewpoint generates an image that slowly registers the urban skyline as the viewer passes by, as opposed to the mathematical abstraction of the city as seen from one single (imaginary) viewpoint.48 This approach is obvious in the oldest fully independent, large-scale printed city view in the Low Countries: the imposing View of the Roads of Antwerp, dated around 1515–18 (Figure  4). This broad, horizontal woodcut represents the city as a detailed line-up of all its major monuments, logistics infrastructure, and public spaces, identified by over 40 inscriptions. A large banderol that extends behind the spire of the Our Ladies Church praises the city as A ­ ntverpia Mercatorum Emporium (‘Antwerp Merchant Emporium’). The View of the Roads of Antwerp merges northern and southern traditions of urban iconography. The effigies of the antique deities Mercury In the first half of the sixteenth century, the urban iconography of Bruges has left remarkably few traces in the archives and museums, especially if one considers the importance of this city and its strong late medieval tradition of urban imaging. For an overview, see Marc Ryckaert, Historische stedenatlas van België. Brugge (Brussels: Gemeentekrediet, 1991). 45 Peter Burke, Antwerp, a Metropolis in Comparative Perspective (Ghent: Snoeck-Ducaju, 1993), p. 12. Burke derives this terminology of ‘orthogenetic’ and ‘heterogenetic cities’ from Robert Redfield and Milton B. Singer, ‘The Cultural Role of Cities’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 3:1 (1954), 53–73. 46 The most important works are the following: Anonymous, The Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes, c. 1490, Westfalisches Landesmuseum, Münster; The Master of the Morrisson Triptych, The Adoration of the Magi, c.  1504, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; and Goswin van der Weyden, Saint-Dymphna Altarpiece, c. 1505, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. For this work see Tijs, Antwerpen, pp. 11–12. For a carved wooden representation of the Antwerp wharf, see The Saint-Dympha Altarpiece, 1480–1500, Saint Dymphna Church, Geel. This altarpiece is discussed in Rita De Boodt, Vlaamse Retabels. Een internationale reis langs laatmiddeleeuws beeldsnijwerk (Leuven: Davidfonds, 2007), pp. 190–92. 47 For a more extensive discussion of urban iconography in Antwerp, see De Rock, ‘The City Portrayed’; An Kint, ‘The Ideology of Commerce: Antwerp in the Sixteenth Century’, in International Trade in the Low Countries (14th–16th Centuries): Merchants, Organisation, Infrastructure, ed.  by Peter Stabel, Bruno Blondé, and Anke Greve (Leuven: Garant, 2000), pp. 213–22. 48 Nuti, ‘The Perspective Plan in the Sixteenth Century. The Invention of a Representational Language’, The Art Bulletin, 76:1 (1994), 109–10; Nuti, Ritratti, pp. 69–99. 44

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Fig. 4: Anonymous artist, Antwerpia Mercatorum Emporium (detail), w ­ oodcut, c. 1515-1518, Museum Plantin Moretus / Prentenkabinet, ­Antwerp, Inv. no. 20839. Photo: Peter Maes.

and Vertumnus, and the abundant maritime elements (Venetian galleys, caravels, and smaller vessels) are closely affiliated with Jacopo de’ Barbari’s breath-taking bird’s-eye view of Venice (1500). On the other hand, the profile view, the horizontal alignment of buildings, and the use of topographical banderols were most likely indebted to the woodcuts that were made in 1486 by the Utrecht artist Erhard Reuwich in Bernard von Breydenbach’s Peregrinationes in terram sanctam.49 Both de’ Barbari and Reuwich resided in the Netherlands but died before or around 1515. Even if these highly mobile artists were not directly involved in its creation, the View of the Roads of Antwerp bears witness to the privileged position of the city as a point of contact with southern Europe and its cultural conventions.50 Even though the image owes much to the local iconographic tradition, it was truly innovative — not only in its high degree of detail and verisimilitude but also in its predominantly secular rhetoric. Shortly before, in 1515, a much more concise image of Antwerp was published by Jan de Gheet in a laudatory book that celebrates the joyous entry of Charles V into Antwerp. The woodcut contains a miscellany of individualized topographical elements, such as the unfinished Church O. Buyssens, ‘Antverpia Mercatorum Emporium Actum 1515 (?). Wie schiep de grote houtsnede en andere gezichten op de rede van Antwerpen uit omstreeks die tijd?’, Mededelingen van de Academie van Marine van België, 6 (1952), 171–202; and Jürgen Schulz, ‘Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice. Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography Before the Year 1500’, The Art Bulletin, 60:3 (1978), 425–74. 50 Elisabeth Ross, ‘Mainz at the Crossroads of Utrecht and Venice: Erhard Reuwich and the “Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam” (1486)’, in Cultural Exchange Between the Low Countries and Italy (1400–1600), ed. by Ingrid Alexander-Skipnes (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 123–44. 49

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of Our Lady, Saint Michael’s Abbey, Saint Walburgis’s Church, and the wharf with the city crane, which are integrated into a rather generic evocation of the urban fabric. This condensed, almost circular image of the city is still deeply indebted to the medieval pictorial tradition. It closely resembles, for instance, the reductionist approach of the cityscapes in Hartmann Schedel’s Weltchronik (1493). A product of early northern humanism, the Antwerp woodcut combines the classical genre of the laus urbis with conventional Christian overtones, as two angels hold a banderol that contain the words: Salve Felix Andwerpia. Conservet[ur] divina fave[n]te gr[ati] a (‘Hail fortunate Antwerp. May it, with God’s favour, preserve its grace’).51 A more imaginative mixture of profane and religious themes characterizes the oldest printed view of Ghent, published in 1524 by Pieter de Keysere. This sophisticated, threefold representation of the city consists of an image of the Ghent skyline, the allegorical figure of the City Maiden, and a heraldic representation of the Three Members of the political administration who had divided power since the 1360s: the patricians (poorterie), the textile guilds (weverij) and the other small craft guilds (kleine neeringen). Above the central towerscape sits the Holy Trinity, accompanied by a banderol with the appropriate psalm: ‘Nisi dominus custodierit civitatem, frustra vigilat qui custodit eam’ (‘Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman wakes but in vain’, Psalm 126:1 of the Latin Vulgate). The woodcut series assembled a polyphonic message from various semantic fields, ranging from traditional aristocratic (lineage and heraldry), corporative (the Three Members), humanist (the Latin references to antique sites), and Christian (the ecclesiastical towerscape and biblical inscription). A multi-layered artefact that registered attempts to capitalize on a grassroots civic ideology, the de Keysere print targeted a broad local audience, ranging from the patriciate to corporate middle-class groups such as well-to-do members of various craft guilds.52 As in the rest of Europe, many early sixteenth-century Netherlandish town views served a laudatory and commemorative purpose.53 Their main function was to praise the beauty, particular virtues, and power of the city, often on the occasion of a special event. As we have seen, the Felix Andwerpia woodcut was part of a booklet with laudatory songs celebrating the entry of Charles  V. It was most likely issued by the elitist Guild of the Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-Lof or the local chamber of rhetoric De Violieren.54 Also in Cologne (Germany, 1531), Amsterdam (1538), and Ghent (1550), a princely entry or jubilee seems to have provoked the creation of a town view.55 Likewise, the View of the Roads of Antwerp contains various commemorative inscriptions that allude to three specific journeys to the Holy Land that were organized by the Antwerp ship owner Dierick Paesschen between 1511 and 1519.56 These journeys were publicly supported by the city government, even though they were a commercial enterprise. The homecoming of the ship involved a certain pomp and circumstance: several barges with the city’s aldermen received the pilgrims in state. It is exactly this event that is commemorated on the View of the Roads of Antwerp; perhaps the woodcuts were sold as a souvenir for the fortunate travellers who survived the 51 Antwerp, Story of a Metropolis, cat. 9. 52 Frederik Buylaert, De Rock, and Van Bruaene, ‘City Portrait, Civic Body and Commercial Printing in Sixteenth-Century

Ghent’, Renaissance Quarterly, 68:2  (2015), 803–39; and Johan Decavele, Panoramisch gezicht op Gent in 1534 (Brussel: Gemeentekrediet, 1975), pp. 10–11. 53 Folin, ‘De l’usage pratico-politique’; and Frangenberg, ‘Chorographies of Florence’. 54 The author of the laudatory motets, Benedictus de Opiciis, was a leading member of De Violieren and an organist in the Guild of the Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-Lof. 55 Leiverkus, Köln, p. 22. For Amsterdam and Ghent, see below. 56 Roger Degryse, ‘De Palestinaschepen van Dierick van Paesschen (1511–1521)’, in Marine Academie. Mededelingen, 23 (1973–75), 15–45.

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journey. An impressive artefact that was intended for semi-public display, the panorama helped to promote Paesschen’s enterprise. Pieter de Keysere’s Ghent print might also have been distributed on a specific occasion, such as the move of de Keysere’s workshop to another location.57 An anonymous, large-scale prospect of the university town of Leuven made around 1540 (Figure 5), however, cannot be related to any particular event. Some scholars have suggested that this panegyric town view — topped with an image of the seven liberal arts — might have functioned as a souvenir for students, even though the Paedagogium Castri (Borghtschole) is the only university building that is clearly indicated on the vista.58 Remarkably, most of these early chorographies contain few allusions to the official municipal authorities. No particular prominence is given to the city hall — in some city views the building is even noticeably diminished in size59 — and typical expressions of the urban governmental discourse, such as adaptations of the ancient slogan ‘SPQR’, are lacking.60 Many — though certainly not all — early chorographies did contain the city’s coat of arms, often in combination with the Habsburg arms, yet this type of sign was far too general and widespread to function as the exclusive symbol of the city government. Apparently, early chorographies were rarely the outcome of a top-down representational strategy. Even if the precise conditions of their origins are often obscure, it is clear that early modern printed town views appealed to a burgeoning culture of consumerism. In this regard the Low Countries did not differ from other European regions. Jacopo de’ Barbari’s woodcut of Venice, for instance, was sponsored, published, and patented by the Nuremberg merchant Anton Kolb.61 According to Bronwen Wilson, sixteenth-century commercial printmakers played an active role in the self-promotion of Venice. With regard to late medieval Germany, Carla Meyer has similarly stated that ‘city branding’ was much more a private and market-driven phenomenon than has often been assumed. Even a relatively autocratic ‘free imperial city’ such as Nuremberg did not develop a straightforward policy for creating a recognizable municipal identity.62 The Apogee of Chorography: The Perspective Plan In the course of the sixteenth century, the viewpoint of pictorial town views gradually rose higher. This constituted a major evolution, for an elevated viewpoint was uncommon in late medieval Netherlandish urban iconography. A  quantitative analysis of 220 early Netherlandish painted town views (1420–1520) shows, for instance, that 78 per cent of the Buylaert, De Rock, and Van Bruaene, ‘City Portrait’. Mark Derez, ‘Gezicht op Leuven’, in De geleerde wereld van Keizer Karel, ed. by Tineke Padmos and Geert Vanpaemel (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2000), pp. 17–20; Jeroen Luyckx, ‘Civitas Lovaniensis. Een onderzoek naar het ontstaan van het gedrukte stadsportret in de Duitse gebieden en de Nederlanden in de 15de en 16de eeuw & een casestudie en contextualisering van het oudst bewaarde gezicht op de stad Leuven’ (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Leuven, 2013). 59 Among the over forty captions that identify the major monuments on the View of the Roads of Antwerp (c.  1518), the town hall is lacking. The building does not even appear on the Felix Andwerpia woodcut (1515), nor does its Ghent counterpart figure on the De Keysere print. On the Leuven panorama (c. 1540) the flamboyant city hall is dwarfed by the collegiate church of Saint Peter. 60 On adaptations of the ‘SPQR’, see Nicolai Rubinstein, ‘Classical Themes in the Decoration of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 50  (1987), 29–43. For Ghent, see Van Bruaene, De Gentse memorieboeken als spiegel van stedelijk historisch bewustzijn. 14de tot 16de eeuw (Ghent: Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde, 1998), p. 322. 61 Deborah Howard, ‘Venice as a Dolphin: Further Investigations into Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View’, Artibus et historiae, 35 (1997), 101–11. 62 Bronwen Wilson, ‘Venice, Print, and the Early Modern Icon’, Urban History, 33:1 (2006), 39–64; and Carla Meyer, ‘“City Branding” Im Mittelalter? Städtische Medien der Imagepflege bis 1500’, in Stadt und Medien: Vom Mittelalter Bis Zur Gegenwart, ed. by Clemens Zimmermann (Cologne: Böhlau, 2012), pp. 19–48 (pp. 46–47). 57 58

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Fig. 5: Anonymous artist (Anton Woensam?), Civitatis Lovaniensis (detail), woodcut, c. 1540, Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels, Print Room, Inv. no. S.I.23172. © Royal Library of Belgium.

panel paintings depict the city in profile, 21 per cent apply an oblique viewpoint, and only 1 per cent employ a bird’s-eye perspective.63 The representation of three-dimensional space on a flat surface constituted a crucial development in Renaissance art and architecture. The correct application of linear perspective, as empirically and theoretically fine-tuned by Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti in the 1420–30s, led to a totally new spatial conception that involved the mathematical abstraction of reality. Originally restricted to an observation from one single point at eye level, the perspective depiction of cities soon entailed oblique projections (such as Francesco Rosselli’s view of Florence, 1480s) and bird’s-eye views (such as Jacopo de’ Barbari’s view of Venice, 1500), which permitted the illusion of a comprehensive vision. Town views of this type show the city from one single elevated viewpoint, from which the projected line of sight meets the earth’s surface at an oblique angle.64 The oblique and bird’s-eye presentations originated on the other side of the Alps — perhaps motivated by the hilly geography of the Italian peninsula — yet soon spread throughout Europe. The gradual ‘axial shift’ away from the profile view becomes obvious upon taking a closer look at the further development of Antwerp’s urban iconography.65 A copper engraving captioned ‘Antwerpia in Brabantia’, traditionally dated between 1524 and 1528, maintains the traditional viewpoint from the left bank of the Scheldt. It represents the city from a much higher vantage point, however, allowing an overview of the forma urbis, the urban fabric and parts of both the street grid and the surrounding hinterland (Figure 6). The sample of 220 city views was taken from 311 paintings made by named Flemish painters from the fifteenth century (ranging from the Master of Flémalle to the Gerard David) and 239 paintings by anonymous painters. See De Rock, ‘The Image of the City Quantified’, graph 2; De Rock, ‘Beeld van de stad. Picturale voorstellingen van stedelijkheid in de laatmiddeleeuwse Nederlanden’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Antwerp, 2011), p. 62. 64 Pinto, ‘Origins and Development’, p. 35. 65 For this ‘axial shift’ and the typology of viewpoints and angles, see Kagan, Urban Images, pp. 5–6. 63

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Fig. 6: Anonymous artist, Antwerpia in Brabantia, 1524-1528, copper engraving, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Print Room, Inv. No. RP-P-OB-4318. © Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

Once more, innovation and continuity went hand in hand: an oil painting dated c. 1540 and also entitled ‘Antwerpia in Brabantia’ opts for an innovative raised viewpoint while recycling a large part of the maritime and architectural detail of the View of the Roads of Antwerp.66 Antwerp’s urban iconography was regularly updated and carefully followed structural changes in the urban layout, such as the replacement of the old town walls by a new fortification system (1542–53), the northern expansion or Nieuwstad (started around 1549), and the construction of the Spanish citadel (1567). An elevated optical angle allowed the viewer to capture both the scale and volume of these structural changes.67 In the case of Ghent, as well, the profile view was soon abandoned for a much more comprehensive vista. In 1534, an anonymous master painted a bird’s-eye view of the town and its surroundings, probably as a commission from Lieven Hughenois, Abbot of Saint Bavo Abbey (Figure 7). The Benedictine monastery buildings and seigneury of Saint Bavo occupy a prominent place in this dramatic panorama that depicts the city from a remarkably elevated viewpoint, enabling it to register both the city’s major monuments and its complex shape, hydrography, and street grid. This view of Ghent is the oldest surviving perspective plan in the Netherlands, and it bears a close resemblance to earlier bird’s-eye depictions such as Jacopo de’ Barbari’s view of Venice (1500) and Jorg Seld’s image of Augsburg (1521).68 The painting’s many inaccuracies and lack of coherence, however, makes it a rather clumsy forerunner of the — predominantly printed — bird’s-eye views that become fashionable in the Low Countries after 1550. The breakthrough of the perspective plan across Europe around the mid-sixteenth century heralds the apogee of early modern chorography.69 Steering a middle course The painting is part of the collection of the MAS Museum in Antwerp. For an illustration, see Tijs, Antwerpen, p. 26. On Antwerp’s expansion and its literary and pictorial documentation, see De Rock, ‘The City Portrayed’. For Barbari’s view of Venice, see above. For Seld’s view of Augsburg, see Peter Barber and Tom Harper, Magnificent Maps. Power, Propaganda and Art (London: The British Library, 2010), pp. 54–55. 69 A concise overview of the first perspective plans makes clear the relatively synchronic and international dimension of this phenomenon. Note those of Augsburg (Seld, 1521), Amsterdam (Anthonisz., 1538), Calais (Petit?, c. 1545), Strasbourg (Morant, 1548), Lyon (Anonymous, 1548–53), Basel (Manuel, 1549), Ghent (Otho, 1551), Frankfurt (von Kreuznach, 1552), Paris (Truschet and Hoyau, c.  1552), London (‘Copper Plate Map’, 1553–59), Rome (Pinard, 1555), Norwich (Cunningham, 1559), Bruges (Gheeraerts, 1562), and Ypres (Thévelin and Destrée, 1564). See Nuti, ‘The Perspective Plan’, pp. 105–28; and Jean Boutier, ‘Cartographies urbaines dans l’Europe de la Renaissance’, in Le Plan de Lyon, 1548–1552. Édition critique des 25 planches originales du plan conservé aux archives de la ville de Lyon (Lyon: Archives municipales de Lyon, 1990), pp. 25–27. 66 67 68

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Fig. 7: Anonymous artist, Ganda Gallie Belgice Civitas Maxima, painting on linen, 1534, City Museum STAM, Ghent. © STAM, Ghent.

between the pictorial portrait and planimetric map, ‘the bird’s-eye view created a makeshift middle ground that was well suited to representing the city. The bird’s-eye view escaped the spatial limitations of perspective but retained certain illusionistic attributes associated with the perspectival system’.70 This representational mode demanded the utmost from the chorographer’s pictorial and surveying capacities. Textual references to perspective plans in city accounts clearly illustrate this hybridity, as they often bracketed the terms charte (‘map’) and portracture or descriptie (‘portrait’ or ‘description’) together.71 An inscription on Virgilio Bononiensis’s famous view of Antwerp (1565) alludes to this duality by stating that the image was made ‘ad vivam similitudinem geometrica ratione’ (‘from life and in a geometrical manner’).72 Most remarkably, the increasing popularity of the perspective plan appears to have gone hand in hand with a growing involvement of urban authorities in public urban iconography. In 1538, the Amsterdam aldermen ordered the painter and engraver Cornelis Ballon and Friedman, ‘Portraying the City’, p. 689. See, for instance, the commission of Jan Otho’s plan in the 1550–51 Ghent city accounts given as ‘quaerte ende protracture’ (‘chart and portrait’, Ghent City Archives, 400, no. 40, fol. 153v). The Leuven aldermen referred in 1570 to a hand drawn and illuminated chorography of the city as a ‘charte ende descriptie vander stadt Loven’ (‘chart and description of the city of Leuven’). See Edward van Even, Louvain dans le passé & le présent (Louvain: Peeters, [1895] 1999), p. 181 n. 3). 72 Leon Voet, Gustaaf Asaert and Hugo Soly, De stad Antwerpen van de Romeinse tijd tot de 17de eeuw. Topografische studie rond het plan van Virgilius Bononiensis (1565) (Brussels: Gemeentekrediet, 1978), p. 134. 70 71

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Anthonisz. to make a portrait of the city, with the intention of presenting it to Charles V. It is unclear if the Emperor actually received a copy, yet for a while the painted bird’s-eye view — an imperfect perspective plan, as the street grid is poorly articulated — adorned the Amsterdam town hall until it was damaged by a fire in 1652. In 1544, Anthonisz. commercialized an almost identical print version of the portrait of the ‘renowned merchant city of Amsterdam’ (Figure 8), which he made in honour of Emperor Charles V, the Amsterdam aldermen, and the lover of art (‘liefhebberen der consten’). He was granted a royal patent with the right to exclusive sale of the print for six years.73 A similar course of events occurred in Ghent in 1550: the urban authorities commissioned Johannes Otho to make a ‘map and portrait of the city, in a proper scale and geometric proportion, including the rivers and structure of buildings’.74 A year later, a downsized woodcut version of the lost original was created and marketed, enabling Otho’s chorography to inspire many late sixteenth-century Ghent town views.75 The woodcut allows us to assess the distinct orthogonal viewpoint used to render the forma urbis, street grid, and waterways (Figure 9).76 Otho’s city view, among many other perspective plans, demonstrates how, in the sixteenth century, the pictorial and geometric languages were closely interwoven and were part of the same representational continuum — as opposed to the modern d­ istinction between the artistic and the scientific. Soon other official commissions followed. In 1561, the Bruges aldermen hired the painter and printmaker Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder to make a charte (‘map’) of the city. His intensive surveying campaign, which only took a few months, resulted a year later in a series of ten copper engraved plates. Like Otho, Gheeraerts boasted an extensive intellectual network of humanist scholars and artists.77 Two years later, the waning town of Ypres also commissioned a ‘portrait and description’ made by the rather obscure painter Jan Thévelin and printed by Jacob Destré (Figure 10).78 Other Netherlandish towns followed suit, but unfortunately many original chorographies are only preserved in copies, adaptations, or archival documents. In 1566, for instance, the Leuven city council invited the goldsmith Hendrick van Diependaele, who had already portrayed (‘bewerpen’) the city in five different ways, to fabricate a comprehensive image of the town and its street grid (‘in huere rondde metten straten’). According to this description, the town council had a perspective plan in mind, emulating many other major towns in the Netherlands. Regrettably, no trace of such a plan survives.79 In The Hague a perspective plan was conceived around 1570. A  painted copy attributed to Cornelis The legend on the print refers to ‘De vermaerde koopstadt van Amstelredam’. See: Ariane Van Suchtelen and Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Hollandse stadsgezichten uit de Gouden Eeuw (Zwolle: W Books, 2008), pp. 14–15. 74 The 1551–52 city accounts refer to a ‘quaerte ende protracture […] up de behoirlycke ende gherechtighe mate ende proportie geometrique […] insghelijcx metten rivieren ende structuren van edificiën binnen der selvre wesende’ (‘a chart and portrait […] in a proper and geometric way […] equally including rivers and edifices within the city’, Ghent City Archives, 400, no. 40, fol. 153v). See Decavele, Panoramisch gezicht, pp. 14–15. 75 André Capiteyn, Leen Charles, and Marie Christine Laleman, Historische atlas van Gent. Een visie op verleden en toekomst (Amsterdam: SUN, 2007), p. 25. 76 A learned humanist and rector of a Latin school in Ghent (from 1545), Johannes Otho was definitely more of a scholar than an artist. For more biographical information, see Decavele, De dageraad van de Reformatie in Vlaanderen (1520–1565) (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1975). 77 Brecht Dewilde, ‘Het sociaal kapitaal van Marcus Gerards’, in Handelingen van het Genootschap voor Geschiedenis te Brugge, 146:2 (2009), pp. 309–46. 78 Marieke Moerman, Diepgaande analyse van twee Ieperse kaarten: het stadsplan van Thévelin-Destrée (1564) en de gravure over het beleg van Ieper van Guillaume du Tielt (1610) (unpublished master’s thesis, Ghent University, 2010), pp. 17–20. 79 Van Even, Louvain dans le passé, p. 181 n. 2. 73

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Fig. 8: Cornelis Anthonisz., De Vermaerde Coopstadt van Amstelredam, woodcut, 1544, University of Amsterdam Library, Special Collections. © University of Amsterdam.

Elandts (1658) informs us of how the original might have looked.80 In Mechelen the ­surveyor Jan van Hanswijck created a refined perspective plan of the city, most likely shortly before the city was heavily damaged by an instance of the Spanish Fury in 1572. Unfortunately, the aquarelle rapidly deteriorated to the extent that a detailed copy from 1812 tells us more than does the original.81 In Antwerp, the oldest preserved perspective plan was printed in 1557 by Hieronymus Cock, most likely as a commercial venture. Five years earlier, however, the Antwerp aldermen had already commissioned Bononiensis to paint and illuminate a map of the city. As in the case of Amsterdam (1544) and Ghent (1551), Bononiensis soon tried to merchandize a printed version of the original. The city accounts reveal that in the late 1550s, Steven van Schuppen, Historische atlas van Den Haag. Van Hofvijver tot Hoftoren (Amsterdam: SUN, 2006), p. 14. Johan Waes, Mechelen in panoramische gezichten en plattegronden. Proeve tot inventarisatie (Mechelen: Catalogus bij de tentoonstelling Antiquarenbeurs in Vlaanderen, 1992), cat. 7.

80 81

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Fig. 9: Jan Otho, Plan of Ghent (down-scaled version of the plan of 1550), woodcut, 1551, University of Ghent Library, Muntenkabinet en Kaartenzaal, Inv. no. BRKZ.KRT.0777. © University of Ghent Library.

the artist applied for a patent to print and sell city portraits.82 It is tempting to associate the lost ‘official’ image of the city and its printed spin-offs with Cock’s print of 1557, as the latter closely resembles Bononiensis’s large-scale perspective plan Urbs Antverpia that was printed in 1565 by Gillis Coppens van Diest. The Urbs Antverpia print, sponsored by some (probably Italian) investors, includes a panegyric verse that was composed by the Antwerp humanist and city secretary, Cornelis Scribonius Grapheus. As Grapheus died in 1558, the text must have been composed some years before the printing of Bononiensis’s design.83 Most likely, it was made for an earlier, ‘official’ city view or on the occasion of a public event, before being ‘recycled’ in the commercial edition of 1565. The important impact of public commissions in the creation of perspective plans might be explained in three ways. First of all, public authorities, both local and central, recognized the potential of chorographies as a discursive instrument and marketing tool that could reach a large audience.84 From the mid-century onward, urban governments started to actively commission perspective views in order to function as gifts, as commemorative artefacts, or as marketing instruments in order to, for instance, highlight the commercial potential of the city. As a result, many bird’s-eye views from the second half of the sixteenth century were 82 Voet, Asaert, and Soly, De stad Antwerpen, pp. 135–36. 83 Voet, Asaert, and Soly, De stad Antwerpen, pp. 136, 145–46. 84 For this approach, see for instance Heike Frozien-Leinz, ‘Der Corputius-Plan. Kommunales Selbsbewusstsein

und Werbemittel. Stadtbilder in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit’, in Von Flandern zum Niederrhein. Wirtschaft und Kultur überwinden Grenzen, ed.  by Frozien-Leinz, Ralf Althoff, and Gerda Fillipiak-Eichwald (Duisburg: Kultur- und Stadthistorisches Museum Duisburg, 2000), pp. 87–100.

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Fig. 10: Jan Thévelin, Perspective plan of Ypres (detail), woodcut printed by Jacques Destré, 1564. © Collectie Stedelijke Musea, Ypres.

conceived as ‘visual encomia’, highlighting both visually and textually the qualities of the city. High-flown captions and, in some cases, elaborate panegyric verses were added.85 In addition, geographic bestsellers like Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (1544) and Braun-Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum (1572–1618) offered an ideal platform for the self-imaging of cities throughout Europe and the New World. The first volume of the Civitates was published in 1572 in Cologne and Antwerp as a commercial product that targeted both scholarly collectors and less learned buyers. Made in a period of escalating tension between the Habsburg state and both municipal and provincial powers, the Civitates functioned, according to Peter Arnade, as ‘a visual poem to the city as aesthetic gem, economic anchor, and essential social form’.86 Little wonder that many town governments were ­increasingly concerned with the creation of an ‘official’ city image. One of the finest illustrations of such a public representation strategy is the perspective plan of Bruges, made in 1562 by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder. City accounts clearly indicate the intention of the urban authorities to overstate the navigable connections between the city and the sea, in order to attract merchants to the waning port of

Marcus Gheeraerts (1562) refers to Bruges as an emporium mercatu celebre, whereas Ypres (1565) is called a civitas munitisima. Bononiensis’s view of Antwerp contains a yet more elaborate praise of the city. 86 Peter Arnade, ‘The City in a World of Cities: Antwerp and the “Civitates Orbis Terrarum”’, in The Power of Space in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Cities of Italy, Northern France and the Low Countries, ed. by Marc Boone and Martha Howell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 197–215 (p. 202). 85

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Bruges.87 The effectiveness of this strategy is illustrated by the testimony of a Bruges citizen who saw the print for sale in 1564 at the Seville market.88 A second explanatory factor is the leading role of municipal authorities in the creation of technical maps for administrative and military purposes. The mastery of yet another method for portraying the city, namely the ichnographic or orthogonal plan, played a crucial role in the development of sophisticated perspective plans. The latter ideally combined an orthogonal projection of the street grid with an oblique, pictorial rendering of the city’s monuments, building blocks, city walls, and surrounding hinterland (as in the 1534 view of Ghent, Figure 7). Since the late middle ages, urban governments had regularly engaged surveyors to measure or to map certain features of the urban topography such as the course of (navigable) water ways, the outline of the city walls, the judicial perimeter of the city, and the boundaries of urban seigneuries and parishes. In the sixteenth century, these predominantly textual or schematic records increasingly turned into pictorial descriptions of urban space. In 1510–11, for instance, the Ghent aldermen asked the painter Gerard Horenbout to supply an ‘extract and description’ of a specific city quarter.89 Also in sixteenth-century Bruges, the municipal government ordered many maps and sketches of the hydrology of the city and its hinterland.90 In many sixteenth-century cities the replacement of the medieval town walls by a completely new fortification system — a result of the so-called ‘military revolution’ — fostered the need for accurate measurements, designs, and detailed drawings.91 In 1547–49, Bononiensis drafted large drawings of the new Antwerp fortification (1542–55) before applying himself to the development of more ‘artistic’ town views for the print market.92 Urban (and central) administrations stimulated the development of orthogonal plans for hydrographic, urban, military, or judicial purposes, thus indirectly enabling artists and surveyors to expand their technical skills and to ‘recycle’ geographic knowhow and data into artistic perspective views.93 A rare specimen of such an ­‘ichnographic’ plan that encompasses the entire city has survived in the Antwerp City Archives.94 A highly dynamic record, the Antwerp plan recycles older versions, merges the outline of the old and new town fortifications in a single document, and tracks fundamental changes to the Antwerp cityscape in the period 1540–70 (Figure 11).95 The intensive practical use of this document as well as constantly changing urban realities explain its relatively limited life span. The circulation of this kind of orthogonal plan undoubtedly facilitated the development of The city accounts literally state: ‘ten fine dat men mercken mach de goede navigatie’ (‘in order that one shall observe good navigation’). See Albert Schouteet, Marcus Gerards: zestiende-eeuws schilder en graveur (Bruges: Koninklijke Gidsenbond Brugge en West-Vlaanderen, 1985), p. 42. 88 Schouteet, Marcus Gerards, p. 42. 89 ‘Zeker extracten ende descriptie van een quartiere van dezer stede, ende ghewesten. vanden Blaermeersch.’ Decavele, Panoramisch gezicht, p. 14. 90 Jan Parmentier, ‘The Struggle to Maintain the Zwin’, in Bruges and Zeebrugge. The City and the Sea, ed. by Parmentier (London: Lloyd’s of London Press, 1995), pp. 64–69. See various illustrations in Ryckaert, Historische stedenatlas, pp. 15, 36, 52. 91 David Buisseret showed how the military revolution relied heavily on new mapping techniques. See Buisseret, The Mapmaker’s Quest: Depicting New Worlds in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp.  103–51. Throughout Europe various (perspective) plans had a military function or subject. In Vienna, for instance, Augustin Hischvogel, who designed the first scaled city plan (1547), was intensively involved in the construction of the new fortifications; Konrad Faber von Kreuznach’s oldest perspective view of Frankfurt (1552) shows the siege of the city. 92 Voet, Asaert, and Soly, De stad Antwerpen, pp. 135–36. 93 On the orthogonal plan in the Low Countries, see Peter Jan Margry, ‘De ontwikkeling van de stadsplattegrond’, in Stadsplattegronden. Werken met kaartmateriaal bij stadshistorisch onderzoek, ed. by Margry, Paul Ratsma and B. M. J. Speet (Hilversum: Verloren, 1987). 94 Felixarchief, Antwerp, Inv. no. 12#11667. Joost Depuydt (Felixarchief ) is currently conducting research on this city plan. 95 De Rock, ‘The City Portrayed’. 87

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Fig. 11: Anonymous artist, Detail from a plan of the city of Antwerp, 16th century, ink on paper, City Archives Antwerp, Inv. no. 12 # 11667. © Felixarchief, Antwerp.

the perspective plan. Well into the eighteenth century ichnographic plans were essentially made for urban planners, military engineers, and civic administrators. In order to appeal to a larger audience these geometric plans were often ‘translated’ into a perspective plan. The accessibility, immediacy, and versatility of bird’s-eye views served the needs of travellers and collectors better than the highly sophisticated orthogonal views.96 Not only municipal governments contributed to an accumulation of accurate cartographic data and knowledge. One of the pioneers of the orthogonal town plan in the Netherlands was the royal cartographer Jacob van Deventer. From c. 1559 to his death in 1575 he produced over 250 plans of Netherlandish towns for the central government in Madrid. Given their high degree of accuracy, their remarkable eye for the surrounding countryside, their largely orthogonal viewpoint, and their systematic use of colours, these chorographies are often interpreted as military tools (with practical value during, for instance, the siege of a city). Nevertheless, Laurens Vollenbronck has recently stressed the political objective behind the Deventer plans: the cartographic documentation of nearly all the cities in the Habsburg Netherlands.97 Pinto gives the example of an accurate ichnographic plan of Ferrara that was drawn in 1597 and that was transposed a year later to an engraved perspective view for a larger audience (Pinto, ‘Origins and Development’, p. 50). 97 Vannieuwenhuyze, ‘Les Plans de villes’; Laurens Vollenbronck, ‘De stadsplattegronden van Jacob van Deventer. Geen militaire maar een territoriaal-politieke functie’, Historisch-geografisch Tijdschrift, 27 (2009), 73–83. 96

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This brings us to a final element that might have triggered municipal authorities to invest in orthogonal plans and perspective views of their city and its hinterland. According to some scholars, the popularity of all-encompassing perspective plans coincides with a growing urge for urban territorial self-entitlement. In imitation of the central state,98 urban authorities were eager to define their territories in a more compelling and legal manner as a ‘bounded space’.99 This preoccupation with urban territory was not a typical early modern phenomenon, yet its pictorial expression was. In 1522–23, the Ghent aldermen summoned Jan van Male to make a painting that captured ‘the limits of the city’.100 In 1564 the Ghent painter Lucas de Heere was paid 60 guilders by Viglius Aytta, provost of the Saint Bavo Chapter, to make a ‘peincture de la seigneurie de Saint Bavo’ (‘painting of the seigneury of Saint Bavo’).101 The painting (now part of the Ghent University Library collection) was largely inspired by the view that had been commissioned by abbot Lieven Hughenois in 1534 (see above; Figure 7). As the Saint Bavo Abbey was dismantled in the early 1540s and was displaced by a Spanish citadel whose contours are only subtly indicated by Lucas de Heere, the historicizing intention behind the painting is clear: it sought to keep alive the memory of the heyday of the Saint Bavo Abbey and Seigneury as well as to support the territorial claims of its successors.102 Even though the painting offered anything but an accurate plan of the city — nor of the judicial boundaries between the abbatial and municipal territory — its authority should not be underestimated. In 1697, it was still consulted and copied in order to settle a territorial dispute between the Bishop of Ghent and the city aldermen.103 Towards the end of the sixteenth century, a growing number of paintings and prints were created in order to establish the boundaries of the cities’ jurisdiction. In 1541, Evert van Schayck painted a panel with the boundaries of the Utrecht jurisdiction (vrijheid) after Governor Mary of Hungary had settled a dispute between the city and Count Philip de Lalaing (Figure 12).104 A scaled map of the Bruges region made by Pieter Pourbus in 1561–71 for the magistrate of the Franc de Bruges carves out the urban territory by means of a distinct red line.105 In 1582, Christopher Plantin illustrated an edition of the Antwerp customary law with an orthogonal projection of the city and the surrounding vrijheid, and in Ghent (1592) and Bruges (1690) a detailed drawing

Edward Muir, ‘Governments and Bureaucracies’, in A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance, ed.  by Guido Ruggiero (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 112. 99 Ellen Wurtzel, ‘City Limits and State Formation. Territorial Jurisdiction in Late Medieval and Early Modern Lille’, in The Power of Space, pp.  29–42; Martina Stercken, ‘Kartographische Repräsentation von Herrschaft’, in Bild und Wahrnehmung der Stadt, pp. 219–40. For a critical approach to the medieval and early modern perception of ‘territory’ as a continuous space, see Bouloux, ‘Culture géographique et représentation du territoire au Moyen Âge: Quelques propositions’, in De l’espace aux territoires. La Territorialité des processus sociaux et culturels au Moyen Âge, ed.  by Stéphane Boissellier (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 89–112. 100 Decavele, Panoramisch gezicht, p. 14. 101 Hendrik Waterbolk, ‘Viglius van Aytta. Maecenas van St.-Baafs te Gent’, in Handelingen van de Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent, 28 (1974), p. 60. 102 In 1537–38, Saint Bavo Abbey was turned into a secular chapter. 103 The dispute concerned jurisdiction in the Ham quarter. See C. Van de Velde, ‘Enkele gegevens over Gentse schilderijen. Het stadsgezicht van Lucas de Heere’, Gentse Bijdragen tot de Kunstgeschiedenis en de Oudheidkunde, 20 (1967), 193–217. 104 ‘Een paradijs vol weelde’. Geschiedenis van de stad Utrecht, ed. by R. E. de Bruin (Utrecht: Matrijs, 2000), p. 51. 105 Ryckaert, Historische stedenatlas, p. 46.

98

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Fig. 12: Evert van Schayck, Plan of Utrecht and its judicial territory (‘vrijheid’), oil on panel, 1541, Collectie Centraal Museum, Utrecht. © Image & copyrights CMU/ Ernst Moritz

or painting of the urban confines was made.106 Still, most sixteenth-century perspective plans did not explicitly delimit urban boundaries. Moreover, they were by no means a straightforward expression of urban autonomy but rather a vehicle through which civic community was inscribed in a larger political landscape: the majority of early modern chorographies contained heraldic and/or textual references to the principality and royal dynasty within which they resided.

106 Voet, Asaert, and Soly, De stad Antwerpen, pp. 62–63. In the seventeenth century, more detailed maps of the Marquisate

of Antwerp were produced. See Tijs, Antwerpen, pp. 84, 105. In 1592, Jan de Buck and François Horenbaut made a plan of the city of Ghent, indicating the position of 10 milestones that marked the border between the urban liberty and the surrounding hinterland (a nineteenth-century copy has been preserved in the Ghent University Library with call number BRKZ.KRT.0801). A  painting made in 1690 by Jan Lobbrecht shows the limits of the Bruges territory or the so-called paallanden (Ryckaert, Historische stedenatlas, pp. 76–77).

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Maps, Chorographies, and Material Culture The impact of early modern chorographies is commensurate with their diffusion across a large and heterogenous audience. The preface to Braun-Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum makes clear that this collection of up-to-date city views was targeted at a very diverse public of travellers, merchants, soldiers, citizens, and scholars.107 To what extent maps and ‘map-like objects’108 like the chorographies gradually occupied a privileged place in sixteenth-century material culture remains a key question, however. Post-mortem inventories and confiscation registers are uniquely informative about the incidence of maps and chorographies in early modern households. By the early sixteenth century, city views are recorded in the collections of affluent merchants like the Fugger of Augsburg. An inventory made in 1527, shortly after the death of Jacob Fugger, documents the existence of a printed view of Antwerp that was displayed in the residence of the Antwerp branch of the family. Classified in the category ‘wooden furniture’, it seems that the print — perhaps the View of the Roads of Antwerp (c. 1518) — was pasted to a panel.109 Furthermore, the inventory specifies that the image was bought on the market, which corroborates the hypothesis that most early chorographies were commercial products.110 In the house of Anton Fugger on the Weinmarkt in Augsburg, various city views were displayed along with many painted panels and a pair of globes representing the celestial and terrestrial realms.111 In 1569, a post-mortem inventory of the wealthy household of the Bruges patrician Jean Baptiste Lommelyn mentions a ‘map of Ghent’. The image was kept in a wooden frame, which again suggests that the map was displayed rather than actively used.112 The analysis of a large corpus of sixteenth-century Venetian household inventories and decoration manuals reveals that maps were often displayed in the most public places in the house.113 The detailed records of the confiscation of 199 households in six Flemish and Brabant cities (Ghent, Courtrai, Mechelen, Antwerp, and Lier) in the period 1567–76 allow a similar — if smaller-scale — enquiry.114 Twenty-five households (8 per cent) contained, in total, fortyseven maps: one city view of Ghent, two parcel plans, six maps of a larger region (Flanders, Holland, or Brabant), and thirty-eight unspecified maps. As stated above, the term ‘map’ (quarte/charte) could refer to both regional cartographies and urban chorographies. Twenty-five maps were displayed in the most public spaces of the house, such as the front 107 Nuti, ‘The Perspective Plan’, p. 107. 108 A term coined by Joseph Monteyne, The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation,

and Social Exchange (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 20.

109 Giant woodcuts and engravings were often attached to a linen cloth for practical and preservational reasons. See Horst

Appuhn and Christian Von Heusinger, Riesenholzschnitte und Papiertapeten der Renaissance (Unterschneidheim: Uhl, 1976), p. 97. 110 The inventory mentions ‘in Antorff getruckt’ (‘printed in Antwerp’), specifying that the print ‘ist erkaufft worden’ (‘was bought on the market’). Norbert Lieb, Die Fugger und die Kunst im Zeitalter der Spätgotik und frühen Renaissance (Munich: Schnell & Steiner, 1952), p. 72. 111 After a visit to the Fugger residence in 1536, a secretary of the papal nuncio mentions the presence of ‘diversae picturae civitatum’. Lieb, Die Fugger und die Kunst, p. 301. 112 ‘Quaerte vander stede van Ghent in een cassyn’. Bruges City Archives, Oud Archief, Staten van Goed, 2e reeks (fonds 217), 15059, fol. 15v. I thank Inneke Baatsen of the University of Antwerp for her kind help. 113 Genevieve Carlton, ‘Making an Impression: The Display of Maps in Sixteenth-Century Venetian Homes’, Imago Mundi, 64:1 (2012), 28–40. 114 This inquiry is based on a database composed by students of the History Department of the University of Antwerp (2012–13). I thank Inneke Baatsen, Isis Sturtewagen, and especially Julie De Groot of the University of Antwerp for sharing data from this database. The confiscation records are kept at the General State Archives in Brussels: T576–3614 (Antwerp/ Lier); I425–1177/13 (Gent); A127/02–296 (Kortrijk); and A127/02–1466 (Mechelen).

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rooms or corridor, whereas fifteen were found in more private rooms, such as the kitchen and chambers at the back of the house (the location of the remaining seven maps is unclear). When considering the number of chambers in each household as an index of its wealth, it becomes clear that maps were purchased almost exclusively by the happy few: nineteen out of twenty-five houses counted seven or more chambers. However, when looking at profession as a social indicator, a more nuanced picture takes shape: well-off craftsmen and teachers might also possess maps and city views.115 The Ghent goldsmith Frederik de Bucq, who kept a portrait of his hometown in the vestibule (voorvloer) of his house in 1567, exemplifies this tendency.116 Still, further research is required in order to optimally assess the prevalence and social function of maps and city views in the material culture of the early modern Low Countries. Epilogue Rather than progressing through consistent, linear development, the evolution of pictorial city views in the Low Countries was a complex process that evolved at different speeds and in different directions. In this respect, the Netherlands did not differ from the rest of early modern Europe. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, the pictorial representation of recognizable contemporary cities gained ground. The huge increase in graphic representations, however, did not usurp the functions of written or oral descriptions, but rather added ‘a new idiom’ to the existing ones.117 Even though the exploration of new or forgotten geometrical techniques significantly contributed to the increasing potential and attractiveness of the visual representation of urban space, the oft-presumed impact of a Renaissance cartographic ‘revolution’ should not be overstated. Several ‘representational styles’ — ranging from the ‘artistic’ profile view to the geometric orthogonal plan — coexisted and were blended into highly hybrid images that have been described by Joseph Monteyne as ‘map-like objects’.118 From an early modern perspective, these diverging ways of representing urban space were not at all mutually exclusive, but were part of a representational continuum. In the perspective plans of the second half of the sixteenth century, this ‘unreal’ combination of an orthogonal representation of the street grid with the perspective rendering of buildings and the surrounding landscape seems to have added to the ‘truth claim’ of the image. These ‘hyperreal’ city views,119 depicted from an imaginary high viewpoint, constituted the apogee of early modern chorography in the Low Countries. The burgeoning reproductive arts gave a major impetus to the development of urban iconography, as printed city views started to attract the interest of shrewd entrepreneurs and, eventually, urban governments. The latter played a decisive role in the development of the perspective plan from the middle of the sixteenth century onward. The ex novo fabrication of a perspective plan was extremely time-consuming and formed a high-risk 115 Out of the ten records that mention a profession, seven are related to ‘middle class’ professions such as tailors, brewers,

goldsmiths, or peddlers. The remaining three households belonged to a notary or lawyer.

116 See also Jozef Scheerder, ‘Documenten in verband met de confiscatie van roerende goederen van hervormingsgezinden

te Gent (1567–1568)’, in Handelingen van de Koninklijke Commissie voor Geschiedenis, 157 (1991), 125–242 (pp. 143, 159).

117 Woodward, ‘Cartography’, p. 12. 118 Monteyne, The Printed Image, p. 20. 119 Likewise, the ‘scientific’ botanical drawings that gained ground from the early modern period onward depicted plants

in a ‘hyperreal’ manner — with both flowers and fruits.

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investment for private entrepreneurs,120 which might explain why most original perspective plans were the result of official initiatives, or at least based on a orthogonal plan initially drawn with an administrative or military f­ unction in mind. Besides the advancement of the visual as a compelling way to represent urban space, several other factors were at play, including the military revolution, the blossoming of humanist and civic culture, the ascending centralized state, and the ongoing bureaucratization and legal discourse. Towards the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, a growing ‘cartographic literacy’ heightened the popularity of the orthogonal town view, sometimes combined with one or more profile views. This final stage of the ‘axial shift’ of sixteenth-century chorography is clearly visible when comparing the successive editions of Ludovico Guicciardini’s Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (first published in 1567).121 At the turn of the century, geometric and pictorial modes were increasingly separated. The perspective plans of the second half of the sixteenth century continued to be reprinted, but the number of new images made in this style gradually decreased. On the other hand, the purely pictorial genres of the veduta and the street view flourished in the seventeenth century, both in the Southern and Northern Netherlands.122

120 It took Jacopo de’ Barbari three years to make his bird’s-eye view of Venice, a venture that was sponsored, unusually, by

the private Nuremberg entrepreneur Anton Kolb, who sought exemption from export duties because of the high production costs. See Wilson, The World in Venice. Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p. 23. 121 Compare for instance the first edition of 1567 with the later edition of 1634. Guicciardini Illustratus. De kaarten en prenten in Lodovico Guicciardini’s ‘Beschrijving van de Nederlanden’, ed. by Henk Deys, Mathieu Franssen, and Vincent van Hezik (Houten: Hes & De Graaf, 2001), pp. 130–31. 122 For the Northern Netherlands, see Stuart  M. Blumin, The Encompassing City. Streetscapes in Early Modern Art and Culture (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press 2009). In the Southern Netherlands, successful historiographical works such as Jean-Baptiste Gramaye’s Antiquitates illustrissimi ducatus Brabantiae (1610) and Antonius Sanderus’s Flandria Illustrata (1641) assembled regional maps, profile and perspective town views, town plans, pictorial streetscapes, and drawings of important civic monuments and rural castles.

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Mapping Time The Netherlandish Carved Altarpiece in the Early Sixteenth Century* Ethan Matt Kavaler Victoria College, University of Toronto

For Lynn F. Jacobs The carved altarpieces of the Netherlands, produced so prodigiously that almost four hundred survive today, seem in many ways out of step with artistic developments of the early sixteenth century (Figure 1).1 Whereas painted altarpieces generally present a single shared spatial continuum across all panels, carved altarpieces fragment space into myriad compartments that suggest to the uninitiated something like a doll’s house. Further, these Brabantine altarpieces situate each of the individual narrative scenes in its own chapel-like setting, a curious constructed space with a problematic relation to the actual location of these works in the churches of the Low Countries and Northern Europe. Finally, most of these carved altarpieces continue to employ a lavish Gothic frame and tracery well into the 1540s, a feature that can seem terribly out of date to students of painting from the period.

I am grateful to Lynn F. Jacobs for sharing with me her considerable knowledge of this subject. I also wish to thank Giancarlo Fiorenza and Elizabeth Legge for reading earlier versions of this paper and for offering helpful suggestions. 1 The literature on Netherlandish carved altarpieces is extensive. For recent synthetic accounts, see Niklas Gliesmann, Geschnitzte kleinformatige Retable aus Antwerpener, Brüsseler und Mechelener Produktion des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2011); Brigitte D’Hainaut-Zveny, Les Retables d’autel gothique sculptés dans les anciens Pays-Bas: Raisons, formes et usages (Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, 2008); Kim  W. Woods, Imported Images: Netherlandish Late Gothic Sculpture in England, c. 1400–c. 1550 (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2007), pp. 1–105; Ria De Boodt and Ulrich Schäfer, Vlaamse retabels. Een internationale reis langs laatmiddeleeuws beeldsnijwerk (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 2007); Constructing Wooden Images, ed. by Carl Van de Velde and others (Brussels: Brussels University Press, 2005); Miroirs du Sacré: Les Retables sculptés à Bruxelles xve–xvie siècles, ed. by D’Hainaut-Zveny (Brussels: CFC-Éditions, 2005); Retables brabançons des xve et xvie siècles: Actes du colloque organizé par le musée du Louvre les 18 et 19 mai 2001, ed. by Sophie Guillot de Suduiraut (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2002); Guillot de Suduiraut, Sculptures brabançonnes du musée du Louvre: Bruxelles, Malines, Anvers xve–xvie siècles (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001); and Lynn  F. Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, 1380–1550: Medieval Tastes and Mass Marketing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). De Boodt and Schäfer, pp. 281–91 count 328 retables from Brabantine towns in international churches and public collections, though their list is inevitably incomplete, especially regarding smaller altarpieces. In addition, there are a number of retables from cities outside Brabant, such as Utrecht. See Mittelalterliche Bildwerke aus Utrecht 1430–1530, ed. by Dagmar Preissing and Michael Rief, exhibition catalogue, Utrecht, Catharijneconvent and Aachen, Suermondt-LudwigMuseum, 2013 (Stuttgart: Belser, 2013), pp. 78–87, 128–33. The approximately four hundred extant altarpieces are but a fraction of those that originally decorated the churches of the Low Countries and Northern Europe. The vast majority of such works that are documented in contracts (or in the testimony of early modern witnesses) no longer survive. Successive waves of iconoclasm, the destruction of two world wars, and the inevitable depredations of time have eliminated most of this considerable production. *

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 31-63. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114000

Ethan Matt Kavaler

Fig. 1: Antwerp workshop, Altarpiece of the Life of the Virgin, 1518–1522, Lübeck, Marienkirche. Photo: author.

Yet these very aspects were essential to the service and appeal of these works. Sub-divided into numerous moments in the narrative of Christ’s Passion or the Life of the Virgin, the altarpieces offered a spatial mapping of time. The carved wooden actors in these dramas inhabit each of the scenes sequentially, their view limited spatially and temporally by the walls of their compartment. But for God, all moments past and future were simultaneously apparent in an eternal present. These altarpieces thus conveyed the deliberate construction of sacred history and approximated a divine perspective on time. The chapel-like enclosures referred — at some remove, of course — to the actual ecclesiastical setting of these artefacts, but, more importantly, they signalled toward an ideal realm in which the actions and actors of these stories were assembled. The intricate Gothic tracery that crowned the individual partitions was instrumental to this project. Tracery, literally a tracing of a geometrical design, might carry with it the Platonic connotations of geometry itself, a perfect ordering of the world in mathematical language close to God before its inevitable corruption through materialization in the world. Many of these elements were initiated earlier in simpler forms that may not have conveyed such ideas as reliably or as clearly. But in the years after 1500, these architectural and ornamental features cohered, presenting a configuration on which notions of divine order, time, and eternity might well be projected. The subject of God’s relation to time was critical, not only to this audience, but to all of early modern society. The idea of an eternal present in which God could see both past and future might easily raise the question of predestination. If God had knowledge of future events, did he not also foreordain them? Would anything less preserve his omnipotence? 32

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Theologians had debated this problem for centuries before it erupted decisively during the Reformation. It was not necessary to have scholastic training in order to appreciate these concerns: various texts, both learned and popular, presented the basic positions. The concept of the eternal present, for instance, reached many readers through Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which enjoyed a particular vogue in the decades around 1500. University lectures addressed the topic, and by the 1520s the subject had become sermon material. Certainly many literate Netherlanders recognized the question of God’s relation to time as both important and current; such a perspective remained a potential mode of access to these carved retables. Issues of chronicity have long intrigued art historians. In his Story and Space in Renaissance Art of 1995, Lew Andrews discussed the phenomenon of continuous narrative, the repeated appearance of the same figures within a single spatial continuum. For example, Andrews addressed Hans Memling’s two paintings that embed numerous religious events in a continuous landscape — a model of sacred time distinct from the one offered by the carved altarpieces.2 Alfred Acres’ articles of 1998 and 2002 exposed a complex web of temporal relations indexed by elements in paintings by Rogier van der Weyden.3 And, more recently, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood teased apart subtle temporal references and their import in a variety of art works in their Anachronic Renaissance of 2010.4 My article engages with this discussion, addressing related resonances in one of the most successful products of the Low Countries’ art industry. Materiality and Transcendence Netherlandish carved altarpieces were imposing objects: the plastic and tactile sculpture of the central case was all the more arresting for its contrast with the two-dimensional painting that decorated the closed face of the retables and often its interior wings. On weekdays, the congregation would see only the painted outer panels of the altarpiece, its sculpture concealed by closed shutters. But on Sundays and other restricted holidays, the magnificent carved interior, gilded and polychromed, would be revealed.5 Caroline Walker Bynum has emphasized the particular power of three-dimensional sculpture to induce vicarious participation in the performance of the narratives it represents.6 It is Lew Andrews, Story and Space in Renaissance Art: The Rebirth of Continuous Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 29–33. 3 Alfred Acres, ‘Small Physical History: The Trickling Past of Early Netherlandish Painting’, in Symbols of Time in the History of Art, ed. by Christian Heck and Kristen Lippincott (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 7–26; and Acres, ‘The Columba Altarpiece and the Time of the World’, The Art Bulletin, 80 (1998), 422–51. 4 Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010). 5 Michele Tomasi has discussed the appeal of the craftsmanship and gilding of the early carved altarpieces ordered by Philip the Bold. See Tomasi, ‘Matériaux, techniques, commanditaires et espaces. Le Système des retables à la chartreuse de Champmol’, in Meaning in Materials, 1400–1800, ed. by Ann-Sophie Lehmann and others, Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, 62 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 28–55. 6 Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011), pp. 24, 67. Marcus Van Vaernewijck recounts the extensive destruction of sculpture and sculptural microarchitecture in Ghent during the iconoclastic riots of 1566. See Van Vaernewijck, Van de beroerlicke tijden in die Nederlanden en voornamelijk in Ghendt 1566–1568, ed. by F. Vanderhaeghen, 5 vols (Ghent: Annoot-Braeckman, 1872–81), i (1872), pp. 99–121. On the consequences of iconoclasm for Netherlandish painting, see David Freedberg, Iconoclasm and Painting in the Revolt of the Netherlands 1566–1609 (New York: Garland, 1988). For a general consideration of iconoclasm in the Low Countries with particular attention to the Northern Netherlands, see Freedberg, ‘Art and Iconoclasm, 1525–1580: The Case of the Northern Netherlands’, in Kunst voor de beeldenstorm, ed. by J. P. Filedt Kok and others (The Hague: Staatsuitgeverij, 1986), pp. 69–84. 2

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no wonder that the iconoclasts were particularly incensed by sculpture, since it most effectively conveyed the impression of a living presence that so excited fears of idolatry.7 And yet the carved narrative retables operated on a different ontological level from the fully plastic and nearly life-size statues of saints that might also adorn the altars or pillars of the church. The diminutive scale of these narrative scenes immediately distanced them from the realm of the observer; most primary carved figures stood between twenty and forty centimetres high. Their reduced scale set these carved scenes apart as representations, as tableaux that might be read as divinely vouchsafed apparitions of sacred events rather than as real presences. Furthermore, the repetition of the same biblical actors in successive partitions indicated that the properties of time and space pertaining to these retables were disjunctive with those of the beholder. We should note that the format of the polyptych was almost exclusive to sculpture in the early sixteenth-century Low Countries. Painted triptychs were fairly common, but concatenations of more numerous scenes are found otherwise only on the painted wings of carved altarpieces.8 Standing behind the altar table, these works conveyed the meaning of Christ’s incarnation and sacrifice by charting the course of His life and that of His mother, by recapitulating their histories. Observers apprehended these central occurrences by ritually rehearsing them, as the stories recounted by the altarpieces were already known in their essentials to most viewers. Devotional texts like Ludolf of Saxony’s Life of Christ prepared the devout to meditate on the carved scenes while acquainting them with the stages of the narrative in extraordinary detail. Because the conventional sequence of events — the plot — was so familiar from texts and retellings, beholders might inspect the carved scenes in any order while preserving the sense of the story.9 Each viewing was thus a distinct performance that gave weight to different moments and aspects of the narrative. Most viewers must have scanned the entire altarpiece before investing themselves in the smaller, individual compartments. They first saw the story presented in its entirety, its separate moments carefully fixed in sequence and framed in a manner that implied plan and purpose. Certain retables combined two narrative series: most frequently those of Christ’s Passion and His Infancy, along with figures of prophets and the possibility of further stories depicted on the painted wings. The altarpieces, thus, often coordinated characters and occurrences from disparate historical periods within a single object. The individual compartments that comprised the altarpieces were themselves temporally complex. For the most part, they depicted what were conventionally recognized as meaningful actions in the narrative, for instance the Marriage of the Virgin or Christ Carrying the Cross. As ‘events’, these signified discontinuity or rupture in the storyline and assumed agency in altering the plot.10 Whether this critical turn occurred in an instant or in an interval of a certain length was a question posed by these retables. Koenraad Jonckheere, ‘Images of Stone: The Physicality of Art and the Image Debates in the Sixteenth Century’, in Meaning in Materials, 1400–1800, ed.  by Lehmann, Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, 62 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp.  116–47; and Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 49. 8 For a recent, comprehensive, and illuminating discussion of the Netherlandish painted triptych, see Jacobs, Opening Doors: The Early Netherlandish Triptych Reinterpreted (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). 9 See in this regard the discussion of Roman mythological sarcophagi in Richard Brilliant, Visual Narratives: Storytelling in Etruscan and Roman Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 161–65. 10 Krzysztof Pomian, L’Ordre du temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 16–19. 7

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We might indeed think of sculpture, a static object, as able to convey nothing more than the disposition of an instant. This notion goes back at least to the eighteenth-century debate about the ancient sculptural group, the Laocoön. Gotthold Lessing then advanced the long-lived thesis that sculpture and painting ‘can use but a single moment of action, and must therefore choose the most pregnant one, the one most suggestive view of what has gone before and what is to follow’.11 Rosalind Krauss has argued, however, for the role of extended time in the perception of sculpture, and although her analysis is based on works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, her presentation of sculpture as a distinctive and complex spatio-temporal medium is highly relevant to this discussion.12 The frozen appearance of the tableau could impart a paradoxical sense of duration, an impression that an instant had been uncannily set apart and extended for contemplation as transcendentally significant.13 Susan Stewart suggests that this effect of the protracted instant is enhanced by the reduced scale of the works with their attendant descriptive detail.14 Yet the diminutive scenes portrayed in the altarpieces could also suggest a limited passage of time. As Acres observes: Even if one accepts the principle of a frozen moment, which holds that a picture must stop time to capture a situation, it is clear that the energies of certain compositions seem to chafe at the boundaries of a supposed instant, so that preceding and subsequent moments are allowed to seep in.15

The complex relation between time and memory was an essential aspect of the understanding of a ‘present’ as separate from a past, a distinction that operated on several levels.16 Carved altarpieces presented a series of events, each set in architectural spaces into which viewers might project themselves as imagined witnesses. The viewer was required to accept each episode portrayed as a ‘present’, but these experiences were haunted by an awareness of both previous and subsequent actions. The protracted act of viewing itself imposed another kind of temporality, the consequence of what Bernard Lamblin has called the ‘itinerary of the eye’.17 Many of the carved partitions each represented a number of discrete actions or elements that were noted Gotthold Lessing, Laocoön, trans. by Ellen Frothingham (New York: Noonday, 1957), p. 92; quoted in Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), p. 10. See also Andrews, p. 20. 12 Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, esp. pp. 1–6. 13 Bernard Lamblin, Peinture et temps (Paris: Klincksieck, 1983), pp. 133–34. The medieval historian and folklorist Axel Olrik, active around the turn of the twentieth century, observed a similar effect of the tableau: ‘One notices how the tableaux scenes frequently convey not a sense of the ephemeral but rather a certain quality of persistence through time: Samson among the columns in the hall of the Philistines; Thor with the World Serpent transfixed on a fishhook; Vidarr confronting the vengeance of the Fenris Wolf; Perseus holding out the head of Medusa. These lingering actions — which also play a large role in sculpture — possess the singular power of being able to etch themselves in one’s memory’. See Olrik, ‘Epic Laws of Folk Narrative’, in The Study of Folklore, ed. by Alan Dundes (Engelwood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 129–41 (p. 138); quoted in Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1984; repr. 1993), p. 48. 14 Stewart, On Longing, 48, 65. 15 Acres, ‘Small Physical History’, p. 10. 16 The role of memory in the perception of time is still debated today. Several models revise Edmund Husserl’s notion of the ‘retention’ in the present of previous events as opposed to the ‘memory’ of discrete, self-contained, past occurrences. For a discussion of Husserl’s thesis and later attempts to address this issue, see Alfred Gell, The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images (Oxford and Washington, DC: Berg, 1992), pp. 221–41. 17 Lamblin, pp. 43–125; and Heck and Lippincott, ‘Symbols of Time in the History of Art’, in Symbols of Time in the History of Art, ed. by Heck and Lippincott (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 1–6 (p. 2). 11

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Fig. 2: Antwerp workshop, Altarpiece of the Life of the Virgin, detail: Birth of the Virgin. 1518–22, Lübeck, Marienkirche. Photo: author.

sequentially by the observer and might thereby impart a sense of duration. In the Antwerp Marian altarpiece in Lübeck’s Marienkirche, for instance, the compartment representing the Birth of the Virgin depicts three essential actions that might be said to occur simultaneously but are read in succession by the viewer: at centre Saint Anne resting in bed after labour; at right the newborn Virgin warmed at the fire by two maids; and at left Joachim praying for Anne’s recovery (Figure  2). The order of registering these elements is not determined, although many viewers might first alight on the birthing bed. In whatever way the scene was examined, the process of interpreting and coordinating the different figures conveyed the sense that their imagined actions took place over time. This perception of time in experiential terms contrasted with the heavenly vision of eternity that the entire segmented altarpiece might communicate. In his discussion of early Netherlandish painting, Acres distinguishes among three categories of temporal representations that prove useful for our subject.18 ‘Large time’ comprises for him those situations in which ‘centuries are telescoped into a single image’. Acres has in mind anachronous juxtapositions like the inclusion of modern donors in depictions of biblical events. Yet we might adapt his notion of ‘large time’ to signify the divine historical plan indicated by the total layout of carved altarpieces, which could similarly unite characters from different eras: Old and New Testament figures, later saints, and even donors. ‘Intermediate time’ is the more contracted temporal span of a recognized narrative presented in terms of sequence and, once again, accords well with the ordered array of partitions in carved altarpieces. ‘Small time’ refers to the intimations of progress or movement 18

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Acres, ‘Small Physical History’, pp. 8–10.

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within a single field and suggests the temporal implications we have described with respect to the individual sections of these retables. The Antwerp altarpiece in Lübeck, carved and shipped to this Baltic port by 1522, is one of the more elaborate and well-crafted of these composite works and illustrates important characteristics of the genre (Figure 1).19 With its inner wings open it presents an easily calculable number of partitions containing figures of somewhat differing size, all sheltered by delicate gilded tracery. The individual compartments that represent selected episodes from the Life of the Virgin are each carefully detailed like a miniature stage set. The copious and highly detailed stage props and costumes are striking. In the section depicting the Birth of the Virgin, for instance, the fireplace reveals meticulous brickwork; a cauldron of subtle design hangs from a crane with carefully modelled teeth for adjusting height. The wooden cupboard by the fireplace and the rear wall of Saint Anne’s bed are composed of panels that carefully replicate the patterns of wood carving on contemporary furniture. The bed is trimmed with an elaborate canopy sporting tassels; the artists have indicated the rich embroidery of its fictive hanging curtains by strategically etching the surface gilding to reveal dashes of blue paint underneath, a simulation of the weave of multicolored threads. An ornamented table with cup and beaker and a basket formed of thin wooden staves are set in the foreground. Further, the clothing of the actors is highly articulated. This conspicuous inclusion of abundant descriptive detail, superfluous to the story, recalls Roland Barthes’ famous concept of the ‘reality effect’. For Barthes such an approach can be characterized as ‘a kind of narrative luxury, lavish to the point of offering many futile details’. Its ‘insignificant notation’ of concrete familiar objects imposes a powerful sense of unmediated actuality, but it is rather a culturally specific convention that signifies the very category of ‘the real’.20 The apparently gratuitous emphasis on the material specificity of objects anchors the altarpiece in the familiar world of experience. The Lübeck retable, though, also includes a direct reference to God’s greater understanding of process and duration. In the compartment at the upper right, we are presented with an image outside of the usual narrative: the ‘Tree of Saint Anne’, an emblem of time itself (Figure 3). The twin arboreal trunks that rise from the breasts of Saint Anne and Joachim, leading up to the Virgin and Child, are a metaphor more commonly reserved for Jesse’s progeny and announce that key moment in sacred history, the Birth of Christ.

The painted shutters are dated 1518. The altarpiece was a gift to the Marienkirche of Lübeck by Johann Bone and installed in the Sängerkapelle in 1522. The predella, which represented the Holy Kinship, is now missing, as is the figure of the Virgin originally shown ascending to heaven above the scene of her Dormition. See Max  J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, 14 vols (Leiden: Sijthoff and New York: Prager, 1967–76), xi (1974) pp. 29–31; Max Hasse, Die Marienkirche zu Lübeck (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1983), pp. 146–48; and Joseph de Borchgrave d’Altena, Notes pour servir a l’étude des retables anversois, extract from the Bulletin des Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire 1957, 1958 (Antwerp: Imprimeries Générales Lloyd Anversois, 1958), p. 95. 20 Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. by Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 141–48. The ‘realism’ of fifteenth-century Italian painting, for instance, was incomprehensible to a Byzantine visitor to Ferrara in 1439. See Joost Keizer and Todd M. Richardson, ‘Introduction’, in The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts, ed. by Keizer and Richardson (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 1–23 (p. 1). For a discussion of the ‘realist’ style as a highly conventionalized, predicated ‘normalcy’ — a common buttress of bourgeois ideology — see John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographs and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). For the application of Tagg’s theories to earlier Netherlandish art see Nanette Solomon, Jacob Duck and the Gentrification of Dutch Genre Painting (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1998), pp. 23–26. 19

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Fig. 3: Antwerp workshop, Altarpiece of the Life of the Virgin, detail: Tree of St. Anne. 1518–22, Lübeck, Marienkirche. Photo: author.

The structure of the Antwerp retable in Vreden, Westphalia, is even more complex (Figure  4).21 This altarpiece tells the story of Christ’s Passion in sixteen compartments. But once more there is an element out of time, a series of seven partitions representing the Infancy of Christ that form the predella. History is thus divided into two narrative sequences that are both contained within the elaborate frame. And here, as well, the scenes of the two series are covered by the same extensive Gothic tracery that imputes a unified purpose and design to the different elements. The splendid gilded frames of these altarpieces with their prodigious Gothic tracery have drawn little discussion. Many of the early writers on these retables reproduced only the carved human figures in their studies, photographically editing the extensive architectural support. Joseph de Borchgrave d’Altena’s book of 1943, Les Retables Brabançons, includes two figural details of the imposing Lombeek altarpiece but omits all reference to its complex and artful casing.22 Lynn Jacobs is one of the few scholars who have addressed this important feature. Focussing on the constructed space of the individual compartments, Jacobs revives the term 21 22

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Der Antwerpener Altar in St Georg Vreden, ed. by Wilhelm Elling (Vreden: Heimatverein Vreden, 1989). Borchgrave d’Altena, Les Retables Brabançons (Brussels: Éditions du Cercle d’Art, 1943), no. 16.

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Fig. 4: Antwerp workshop, Passion Altarpiece. c. 1525, Vreden, St. Georg. Photo: author.

Kapellenschrein that had been parenthetically introduced by German art historians during the first half of the twentieth century.23 The word stresses the relation to actual chapels but also refers obliquely to reliquaries with their conspicuous gilding.24 One Netherlandish contract refers to these compartments explicitly as choeren vanden backe (‘choirs in the casing).25 Certainly they may have seemed so to educated laymen, though notaries were not theologians, and their terminology should not constrain our interpretation. At any rate, this characterization discounts significant elements of the architectural structures. A good example of the unusual composition of these works is the Passion Altarpiece in Strängnäs Cathedral, a product of an excellent Brussels workshop and an early export to Sweden.26 Each of the seven scenes of Christ’s ordeal is set in its own rather extraordinary church-like compartment (Figure 5). The partitions are all enclosed by a polygonal rear wall Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, pp. 115–45; Georg Dehio, Handbuch der deutschen Kunstdenkmäler, iii, Süddeutschland (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1920), p. 258; Hubert Schrade, Tilman Riemenschneider (Heidelberg: Hainverlag, 1927), pp.  121–23; and Walter Paatz, ‘Ein nordwestdeutsche Gruppe von flandrischen Schnitzaltären aus der Zeit von 1360–1450’, Westfalen, 21 (1936), 49–68 (p. 58). 24 The common inverted ‘T’-shape of the altarpieces — suggesting a cross section of a basilica — has been adduced in support of this direct relationship to the space of the church. See Jacobs, ‘The Inverted “T”-Shape in Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces: Studies in the Relation Between Painting and Sculpture’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 57  (1990), 33–65. 25 Jan Crab, Het Brabants Beeldsnijcentrum Leuven (Leuven: Ceuterick, 1977), pp.  323–24; and Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, p. 116. 26 Aron Andersson, Medieval Wooden Sculpture in Sweden, iii, Late Medieval Sculpture (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1980), pp. 186–90; and Miroirs du Sacré, pp. 214–15. The altarpiece was a gift from Bishop Cordt Rogge to the cathedral and is usually dated around 1490. 23

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Fig. 5: Brussels workshop of Jan Borman, Passion Altarpiece, detail: Ecce Homo, c. 1490, Strangnäs, Cathedral. Photo: author.

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resembling an apse, and all are equipped with credible if fictive windows filled with Gothic tracery. Yet a moment’s consideration reveals that this is very far from a believable ecclesiastical setting. The sides of the compartments, extraordinarily decorated with blind tracery, house small alcoves containing even smaller narrative scenes. The profuse ornament and complexly nested subsidiary spaces indicate the ideal character of the structure, designed for the celebration and spatially nuanced presentation of the narrative. All pretence to realistic church space is abandoned in the scene of Christ’s Agony in the Garden, as Jacobs has observed. Here the architectural housing contains action occurring out of doors.27 The tracery is summarily omitted from the back wall of the so-called chapel, and vegetation is painted on its blank surface — a detail that emphasizes once again the irreal nature of the space. Perhaps the most conspicuous elements are the large and intricate baldachins suspended above the figures in altarpieces (Figure 6). These traceried carvings have nothing to do with the real architecture of chapel or choir; they are much closer to the tabernacles surmounting sacrament houses or pulpits that serve as stages for the glorification of the Eucharist or the Word.28 These baldachins were especially prized and are specifically mentioned in contracts, which occasionally specify that especially elaborate designs be employed in certain compartments. Special craftsmen arose, called cleynstekers, metselariesnijders, or occasionally schrijnwerckers, to address this need. Jan Petercels of Leuven, for instance, was particularly in demand for these assignments, contributing to retables by Jan Borman, the esteemed figure carver from Brussels.29 The Architecture of Time One of the functions of sacred art was to convey the authority behind the laying out of time, the order that underlies the unfolding of sacred history. Typological references between the Old and New Testaments commonly signalled something of this plan.30 The mystical coherences between the two eras might appear as half-obscured references in the visual arts, a sign that God’s law will out. Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of the Adoration of the Magi in Madrid, for example, represents the Sacrifice of Isaac on a golden and bejewelled gift to the Madonna and Child, a prefiguration of the sacrifice of Christ.31 But typology was itself part of a larger project showing the deliberate and purposeful weaving together of the strands of time. Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, p. 121. Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, pp. 123–27. Jacobs sensitively compares the architectural ornament to the gold reliquaries with their openwork spires and to larger works of Gothic microarchitecture like the sacrament house in the Jacobskerk in Leuven of 1536–38. 29 Jan van Damme, ‘Omtrent het aandeel van de Antwerpse schijnwerkers in de retabelproduktie’, in Antwerpse retables 15de–16de eeuw: Essays, ed.  by Hans van Nieuwdorp (Antwerp: Museum voor Religieuze Kunst Antwerpen, 1993), pp. 54–56 (pp. 54–55); and Crab, pp. 323–25, nos 21–23. 30 On typology, see Bernd Mohnhaupt, Beziehungsgeflechte: Typologische Kunst des Mittelalters (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000); Friedrich Ohly, ‘Halbbiblische und außerbiblische Typologie’, in Schriften zur mittelalterlichen Bedeutungsforschung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977), pp.  361–400; Christopher Hughes, ‘Typology and Its Uses in the Moralized Bible’, in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and AnneMarie Bouché (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 133–50; Brigitte Dekeyzer, ‘Typologische creativiteit in de late Middeleeuwen: de dialoog tussen Oud en Nieuw Testament in de Gents-Brugse boekverluchting’, Millennium, 17 (2003), 121–44; Leonhardt Goppelt, The Typology Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982); Earl Miner, Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Peter Martens, ‘Revisiting the Allegory/Typology Distinction: the Case of Origen’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 16 (2008), 283–317; and Eric Auerbach, Typologische Motive in der mittelalterlichen Literature (Krefeld: Scherpe-Verlag, 1953). 31 Larry Silver, Hieronymus Bosch (New York: Abbeville Press, 2006), pp. 164–77 (esp. p. 168). 27 28

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Fig. 6: Brussels workshop, Saluzzo Altarpiece, c. 1515, left inner wing. Photo: Musée de la Ville de Bruxelles-Maison du Roi.

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Fig. 7: Biblia Pauperum, Netherlandish, blockbook, 2nd half of the 15th century. Photo: Dresden, SLUB / Deutsche ­Fotothek, Martin Würker.

A different method for visualizing these temporal coherences was to imagine an architectural structure to history. The Biblia Pauperum, which united Old and New Testament events, arrayed its disparate scenes within a rudimentary architectural support (Figure 7).32 This armature is highly significant, for it implies the wilful act of constructing 32

Biblia Pauperum, A Facsimile and Edition, ed. by Avril Henry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

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such an edifice of time and the authority required to do so. Similar devices, frequently simulating a skeleton of gold work or gilded brass, were used in tapestries as a means of isolating and displaying different scenes belonging to a sacred narrative.33 More elaborate were paintings in early sixteenth-century manuscripts that nested different biblical stories within frames of fictive gilded tracery. A  page from the Grimani Breviary, for instance, represents Joseph as Viceroy in Egypt in its largest field, while smaller grisaille images of Jacob’s Ladder, Elijah’s Ascent into Heaven, and two prophets are located in marginal areas defined and divided by the simulated sculpted ornament.34 This type of border became enormously popular after 1500, especially between 1510 and 1530. It was a typical feature of the most prestigious commissions and was frequently employed for the books of hours and breviaries of rulers and the high nobility.35 The use of this device in manuscripts has been related to contemporary carved and gilded altarpieces, presumably as it carried with it the memory of devotional practice before these objects.36 It is more likely, however, that designers in both media adopted similar strategies for semiotic and metaphysical purposes. Certain manuscripts from around 1520–30 dispense with the imitation of architectural forms while retaining the golden frames that subdivide the page into discrete fields for separate narratives. Here there is no reference to church furnishing though the structured presentation of information is comparable.37 But it was, perhaps, the carved altarpieces of the Netherlands that most successfully developed this strategy. These retables similarly housed numerous significant episodes within their complex cases, and their Gothic tracery, which seems to stitch together the different events, abetted this service (Figure 8). Indeed, the tracery might suggest the very filaments of time, the appreciable stuff of history. This is one of the reasons why Gothic forms persist in the frames to these altarpieces decades after Italianate ornament was adopted in Netherlandish painting — and sometimes even within individual partitions of the carved retables themselves. In the Antwerp altarpiece in Lübeck, for instance, the scene of the

A la manera de flandes: Tapices ricos de la Corona de España, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, Salas de Exposiciones temporalis, 2001–2002 (Madrid: Patimonio Nacional, 2001), pp. 62–63, 68–77. 34 Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS Lat. I. (2138), fol. 192r. For a modern facsimile, see The Grimani Breviary, ed. by Mario Salmi and Gian Lorenzo Mellini, (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1974), pl. 39. 35 For example, the Prayer Book of Charles V (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 1859); the Prayer Book of the Family de Croÿ (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Ser. no. 2844); the Hours of Joanna of Castile (The British Library, Add. MS 18852); the Breviary of Eleanor of Portugal (Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.52); the Hours of Margaretha van Bergen (The Huntington Library, HM 1131); and the Croÿ-Arenberg Hours (Collection of the Dukes of Arenberg). The device is also found in the Da Costa Hours (Pierpont Morgan Library, MS 299); a prayer book in Copenhagen (Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Gl. Kgl. Saml. 1605, 4º); the book of hours known as the ‘Golf Book’ (The British Library, Add. MS 24098); and another book of hours also in London (The British Library, Add. MS 35314). See Thomas Kren and Scot McKendrick, Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum and London, Royal Academy of Arts, 2003–2004 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003), pp. 322, 332, 355, 370, 387, 389, 421, 477, 487. 36 Kren and McKendrick, Illuminating the Renaissance, p. 420. 37 This technique is found primarily in the work of the painter known as the Master of James IV of Scotland, notably in the Spinola Hours ( J. Paul Getty Museum, MS Ludwig IX 18 [83.MI.114]) and the surviving leaves from the Genealogy of the Royal Houses of Spain and Portugal (The British Museum, Add. MS 12511). See Kren and McKendrik, Illuminating the Renaissance, pp.  414–19, 426, 442, 460–63, 470–71, 505. A  curious mélange of manuscript painting and altarpiece construction is manifested by the Stein Quadriptych in Baltimore (Walters Museum of Art, W. 442). These four panels contain sixty-four miniature scenes from the lives of Christ and the Virgin, each framed by golden bars that subdivide each wing into sixteen fields. This c. 1530 work, which measures only thirty-five by twenty-nine centimetres in its entirety, was executed by Simon Bening, the leading manuscript painter in Bruges. See Kren and McKendrick, Illuminating the Renaissance, pp. 458–60. 33

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Fig. 8: Antwerp workshop, Altarpiece of the Life of the Virgin, detail of baldachin tracery, 1518–22, Lübeck, Marienkirche. Photo: author.

Presentation in the Temple includes a miniature altar table in the voguish ‘antique’ manner, yet this tableau, much like all the others, is sheltered by an elaborate Gothic baldachin. Such ornament was an essential and conspicuous element of these altarpieces that might be manipulated in various ways. The Retable of the Seven Joys of the Virgin, carved in alabaster by Brussels sculptors around 1515–22 for Margaret of Austria’s church at Brou, exemplifies the profound effects that might be achieved.38 Here the Gothic is intentionally contrasted with the antique or Italianate mode. The architecture within the individual compartments is in the antique manner. The Nativity, for example, is set in front of a massive Roman triumphal arch that is foreshortened perspectivally (Figure 9). Yet running through each compartment are the uprights and galleries of what appears to be a giant Gothic jubé or screen that unites the disparate scenes. This object is not foreshortened; it is discordant with the narrative and refuses to recede according to the perspectival rules that govern the antique stage props. It is also, strangely, ignored by the actors. Rather, like the Gothic tracery that surmounts each compartment, it suggests the metaphysical structure of time, supporting in order the different moments depicted. The crossing ribs placed against the ceiling of altarpiece compartments perform a similar function. Although these details refer directly to actual church architecture, they also signify the vaults of heaven. Particularly complex and ostentatious vaults, for instance, occur in the High altar at Kalkar on the Lower Rhine, a c.  1499 retable designed and Ethan Matt Kavaler, ‘Renaissance Gothic: Pictures of Geometry and Narratives of Ornament’, Art History, 29 (2006), pp. 1–46 (pp. 26–29, 34–35). Guillot de Suduiraut believes that most of the figures of the Brou altarpiece were carved by 1515 or 1516. By 1522, the alabaster frame with its architectural detailing was completed. She considers a few additional figures, carved in what seems to be a more modern style, to date from slightly later, around 1528. See Guillot de Suduiraut, ‘Le Retable des sept joies de la vierge dans la chapelle de Marguerite d’Autriche à Brou: Les Sculptures gothiques de style bruxellois réalisées vers 1513/1515–1522’, in Brou, un monument européen à l’aube de la Renaissance, papers from the conference held at the Monastère Royal de Brou, Bourg-en-Bresse, 13–14 October 2006 (Paris: Éditions du patrimoine, 2009), pp. 116–24, http://docplayer.fr/11609294-Brou-un-monument-europeen-a-l-aube-de-la-renaissance-brou-a-european-monument-inthe-early-renaissance.html [31 May 2013].

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Fig. 9: Brussels workshop, Retable of the Seven Joys of the Virgin, detail of the Nativity, c. 1515–22, Brou (Bourg-en-Bresse), St. Nicolas de Tolentin. Photo: author.

largely carved by Arnt van Zwolle.39 Here the events of the Passion are all shown out of doors without any firm division or chapel setting. Nevertheless, they are all covered with an extensive and rather extraordinary vault that implies the divine scaffolding of the heavens, the God-given order of things. We should note that the Gothic baldachins and tracery became ever more abstract and removed from actual church ornament as the sixteenth century progressed. The carved Antwerp altarpiece in Lübeck of 1522 is cloaked in a gossamer web of exceedingly thin arcs and buttresses (Figure 8), while the Passion Altarpiece in Opitter from the 1540s has its compartments stitched together by even more diaphanous elements of tracery.40 This sort of ornament, exquisitely delicate and golden, might easily suggest the palace of heaven. Jacobs has proposed this correlation on the basis of the resemblance Hans Peter Hilger, Stadtpfarrkirche St Nicolai in Kalkar (Kleve: Boss-Verlag, 1990), pp. 65–95. The sculptured parts were completed, most probably, in 1499. The painted wings were executed a few years later. Master Arnt, the original sculptor also known as Arnt von Kalkar, died in 1492, necessitating completion of the altarpiece by Jan van Halderen and Ludwig Juppe. 40 Antwerp Altarpieces 15th–16th centuries, ed.  by Van Nieuwdorp, exhibition catalogue, Antwerp, Onze-LieveVrouwekathedraal (Antwerp: Museum voor Religieuze Kunst Antwerp, 1993), pp. 108–17, no. 15. 39

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Fig. 10: Jean Bellegambe, Last Judgment. Detail: the Ascent of the Blessed, c. 1525, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. Photo: author.

of these altarpieces to the earthly church, which in turn could represent the heavenly Jerusalem.41 But the skeletal frames with their frail and spindly decoration could on their own evoke thoughts of a celestial domain. The carved altarpiece in Lübeck, for example, originally included a small figure of the Virgin ascending to heaven above the scene of her Dormition. She was received, not by sculptures of Christ and God the Father, but solely by the ethereal gilded tracery that signified her abode in eternity.42 The associations between gold work, Flamboyant Gothic design, and celestial architecture are expressed in several paintings of the early sixteenth century and seem to have been generally recognized. Take, for instance, the Last Judgment Triptych by Jean Bellegambe of c.  1525.43 The upper left corner of the triptych shows the ascent of the blessed into heaven (Figure  10). This passage is organized around two remarkable Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, pp. 142–44. Hasse, Die Marienkirche, p. 146, illus. 88. This figure of the Virgin ascending was stolen in 1945. A similar figure of Mary ascending into a heaven represented solely by tracery occurs in the Lombeek Altarpiece, in the scene of the Translation of the Body of the Virgin. 43 Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, xii, nos 114, 121, 130; and Robert Genaille, ‘L’oeuvre de Jean Bellegambe’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 87  (1976), 18–20, 25–26, nos  9, 27. Bellegambe’s painting of the Last Judgment is in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. 41 42

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b­ uildings: on the earth is a substantial spiral edifice, surrounded by stairs and turrets, while at the end of the journey, the saved are welcomed into a heavenly palace designed as an epitome of Flamboyant architecture.44 This circular, insubstantial building is formed of tall, slender arches with elaborate tracery and delicately articulated buttresses and pinnacles. It is a habitation constructed by God for the blessed, as we read in the epistles of Paul (II Corinthians 5.1): ‘For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands’. Bellegambe’s fictive edifice is an ideal structure ‒ like goldwork, it is more delicate and refined than any product of earthly engineering. Similar creations occur in contemporary Netherlandish manuscript painting. The depiction of the Coronation of the Virgin in the Sforza Hours (c. 1517–21) shows Christ and God the Father in heaven, seated on an elaborate golden throne with a magnificent raised open back that is filled with sophisticated geometric filigree.45 The intricate tracery configurations that line the compartments of so many altarpieces might be received as the same holy material — or rather as a precious index of divine thought registered in pure geometry (Figure  6). Because these linear compositions were studies in the system of mathematical proportions that was considered a gift of God, they might also be received as representations of ideal, perfect forms before their flawed materialization on earth. Geometry and the Divine The association between geometry or geometrical figures and the divine spans the entire Middle Ages.46 Many early Christian texts remained foundational for the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: Origen, for instance, who had described geometry as a means for understanding God and the cosmos, was often cited by Erasmus.47 Cassiodorus, writing in the sixth century, explicitly presented geometry as a divine instrument of creation: Geometrizat enim, si fas est dicere, sancta Trinitas, quando creaturis suis, quas hodieque fecit existere, diversas species formulasque concedit; quando cursus stellarum potentia veneranda distribuit, et statutis lineis facit currere quae moventur certaque sede quae sunt fixa constituit. quicquid enim bene disponitur atque completur, potest disciplinae huius qualitatibus applicari. The Holy Trinity employs geometry when it grants various species and forms to its creatures which it has even now caused to exist; when with venerable power it apportions the courses of the stars and causes those which are movable to pass Remarkably similar is the crown of the tower of the Church of the Magdalen at Verneuil in Normandy, which is nearly contemporary with Bellegambe’s painting. For this and other related Flamboyant structures, see Kavaler, Renaissance Gothic: Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe 1470–1540 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 114–22, 160–62, illus. 163. 45 The British Library, Add. MS 34294, fol. 124. See Dekeyser, Herfstij van de vlaamse miniatuurkunst: Het Breviarum Mayer van den Bergh (Ghent and Amsterdam: Ludion, 2004), p. 103. See also the Coronation of the Virgin in the Breviary of Isabella of Castille (The British Library, Add. MS 18851, fol. 437), illustrated in Kren and McKendrick, Illuminating the Renaissance, p. 50, illus. 25. 46 Much of this material is presented in my earlier article, Kavaler, ‘Renaissance Gothic’, pp. 11–16. 47 Erasmus edited Origen’s writings in an anthology of texts by early Greek theologians: Des.  Erasmi Rot.  Opervm Octavvs Tomvs: Theologica ex graecis scriptoribus theologicis ab ipso in Latinum sermonem transfusa complectens, quorum nomenclaturam versa pagina facies indicat (Basel: Hieronymus Froben, 1540); and Evgeny A. Zaitsev, ‘The Meaning of Early Medieval Geometry from Euclid and Surveyors’ Manuals to Christian Philosophy’, Isis, 90 (1999), pp. 522–53 (p. 530). 44

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swiftly along established paths and sets in a definite position those which are fixed. Whatever is well ordered and complete can be attributed to the properties of this science.48

This passage enjoyed considerable popularity and was included by Rhabanus Maurus in the chapter on geometry in his De institutione clericorum and in certain other early medieval geometries. Even more consequential for the late Middle Ages were the writings of Augustine and Boethius, who similarly cast geometry as the conceptual armature of creation and as an instrument of cognition.49 This was very much the view expressed in a famous treatise, falsely attributed to Boethius, that considered geometry a tool for comprehending God and the heavens, much in the manner of Origen.50 Augustine went still further, claiming that the sight of geometric forms conveyed a sense of divine order beyond anything that the mind could imagine. These geometric figures, in fact, constituted the basis of an aesthetics: Hinc est profecta in oculorum opes et terram coelumque collustrans, sensit nihil aliud quam pulchritudinem sibi placere, et in pulchritudine figuras, in figuris dimensiones, in dimensionibus numeros; quaesivitque ipsa secum utrum ibi talis linea talisque rotunditas vel quaelibet alia forma et figura esset, qualem intellegentia contineret. Longe deteriorem invenit et nulla ex parte quod viderent oculi cum eo quod mens cerneret comparandum. Haec quoque distincta et disposita in disciplinam redegit appellavitque geometriam. From here on [reason] advanced to the power of eyes, and while contemplating the Earth and the Sky, it felt that it liked only the beauty; and in the beauty, the forms; in the forms, the measures; in the measures, the numbers. And it scrutinized in itself whether there existed such a line or roundness, such a form or figure that corresponded to what the reason contained in itself. In what the eyes saw it found nothing comparable to what the intellect itself conceived. And these distinct and orderly [forms] it transmitted to a discipline, which it called geometry.51 Cassiodorus, Introduction to Divine and Human Readings, trans. by Leslie Webber Jones (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), p. 197; Zaitsev, ‘The Meaning of Early Medieval Geometry’, pp. 540–41; and Nigel Hiscock, The Wise Master Builder: Platonic Geometry in Plans of Medieval Abbeys and Cathedrals (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 115–16. For Cassiodorus, see B. Bennett, ‘Cassiodorus’, in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 13 vols (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1982–89), iii (1983), pp. 123–4. Cassiodorus remained current in the fifteenth century less through his Institutiones, however, than through his Historia ecclesiastica tripartite, which was published at Augsburg, Cologne, Strasbourg, and Paris before 1500. 49 Zaitsev, ‘The Meaning of Early Medieval Geometry’, p. 530. On the later medieval reception of Boethius, see H. Patch, The Tradition of Boethius: A Study of His Importance in Medieval Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935); and D. Pingree, ‘Boethius, Geometry and Astronomy’, in Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, ed. by M. T. Gibson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp. 155–66. 50 Boethius, Liber de geometria, in Patrologiae cursus completus, ed. by J. P. Migne, Series Latina, 221 vols (Paris: Migne, 1844–64), lxiii (1847), col. 1353B; Zaitsev, ‘The Meaning of Early Medieval Geometry’, p. 531. This passage was taken up in several manuscripts on geometry. On the metaphysical aspects of this book, known as Geometry i, see Hans  M. Klinkenberg, ‘Der Verfalldes Quadriviums im frühen Mittelalter’, in Artes Liberales: Von der antiken Bildung zur Wissenschaft des Mittelalters, ed.  by Josef Koch (Leiden: Brill, 1959), pp.  1–32. Zaitsev rejects Klinkenberg’s claim concerning the ‘degradation’ of metaphysical beliefs in the early geometrical treatises and remarks that the author’s attribution of Geometry i to Boethius himself has been thoroughly discredited. 51 Augustine, De ordine, 2. 15. 42, in Corpus Christianorum, ed. by W. M. Green and K. D. Daur, Series Latina (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954–), xxix (1970), p.  130; Zaitsev, ‘The Meaning of Early Medieval Geometry’, p.  530. I  borrow Zaitsev’s translation. This passage was further incorporated in the Institutiones of Cassiodorus. See Cassiodori Senatoris Institutiones, ed. by Roger A. B. Mynors (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1937), pp. xxx–xxxi. 48

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The principal strain of this writing was clearly Platonic,52 based above all on the Timaeus, the dialogue best known to medieval authors that describes the creation of the world in terms of geometric figures.53 It is worth recalling that the well-known image of God as a geometer using a compass to create the world survived into the fifteenth century.54 This belief in the divine nature of geometry continued unabated into the period of the carved altarpieces. Alan of Lille, the twelfth-century theologian much cited in the late fifteenth century, reveals his debt to the Timaeus when he states that ‘omne nomen mathematicum minus improprie dicitur de deo quam concretiuum’ (‘every mathematical name is less improperly said of God than is a concrete name’).55 Treatises on geometry The Greek Platonists had judged the universe to be divided into three levels. The upper region contained solely eternal ideas, whereas the lower held the changeable matter of the natural world. The middle level, however, comprised mathematical and especially geometric forms, a register of communication between perfect concepts and imperfect natural objects. A fragment from an early commentary on Euclid states that ‘Euclid’s intention is twofold: aimed at the pupil and the nature of things […] At the nature of things, since it is known that the science of nature and the splendid learning of Timaeus or Plato demonstrate geometrically’. Zaitsev, ‘The Meaning of Early Medieval Geometry’, pp.  522–23; 530–31. In the De opiticio mundi, Philo discusses how God first made a world of perfect ideas, which he used as a pattern for the imperfect material world. See Jonathan Block Friedman, ‘The Architect’s Compass in Creation Miniatures of the Later Middle Ages’, Traditio, 30 (1974), 424–25. 53 It may well have been through other writers that the idea reached the later Middle Ages. The passage in the Timaeus that discusses the role of geometric figures in generating the four elements was not taken up in Calcidius’s translation, the principal version of Plato’s text available until the late fifteenth century. Calcidius’s commentary did treat in distinctly geometric terms Plato’s notion of the chora, a pre-existent place for things to be created that allowed the embodiment of ideas. The Platonic interpretation of geometry is fully present, however, in Proclus’s commentary on Euclid, In primum Euclidis, definitions 26–29, 166–67. See Aristotle, De caelo, 279 B 33; Cassiodorus, An Introduction to Divine and Human Readings, trans. by Jones (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), p. 197; Zaitsev, ‘The Meaning of Early Medieval Geometry’, pp. 540–41; and Hiscock, The Wise Master Builder, pp. 115–16. For philosophical concepts of place in the Middle Ages and its geometric determinants, see Zaitsev, ‘The Meaning of Early Medieval Geometry’, pp. 545–46, who surveys the pertinent writings of Macrobius, Boethius, and Scotus Eriugina. On the survival of Platonism in the Middle Ages, see Gibson, ‘The Study of the Timaeus in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, Pensamiento, 25  (1969), 183–94; and R.  Klibansky, The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition during the Middle Ages, Supplement, Plato’s Parmenides in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: A Chapter in the History of Platonic Studies (Munich: Kraus International Publications, 1981). Klibansky, The Continuity, p. 28 notes that manuscripts of Calcidius’s translation of the Timaeus were in all important medieval libraries. Paul Frankl goes so far as to assert that ‘Plato sanctified the equilateral triangle and the square […] The medieval esthetic, insofar as it was based on Plato, took over this identification’. See Paul Frankl, ‘The Secret of the Medieval Masons’, The Art Bulletin, 28 (1945), 46–60 (p. 58). 54 Friedman, ‘The Architect’s Compass’, pp. 419–29; and Zaitsev, ‘The Meaning of Early Medieval Geometry’, p. 536. Several miniatures from the fourteenth and fifteenth century demonstrate the continuing relevance of this notion for the late Middle Ages. The conceit may partly derive from Proverbs 8.27–29: ‘When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth’. But as Lynn White and John Murdoch maintain, the image may also have been inspired by Platonic ideas of God as craftsman using geometry as the prime technology in forming the universe. This notion of God as an artisan, however, was potentially problematic as it suggested that matter was already present when God set about shaping it and that He required tools for this purpose. See White, ‘Cultural Climates and Technological Advance’, in Medieval Religion and Technology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 217–53; Murdoch, Album of Science: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York: Scribner’s, 1984), p. 330; and Zaitsev, ‘The Meaning of Early Medieval Geometry’, pp. 536–38. The doctrine of such coexistence of matter with God was rejected by Peter Lombard, Alan of Lille, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thierry of Chartres. See Marie-Dominique Chenu, La Théologie au douzième siècle (Paris: J. Vrin, 1976), pp. 113–15. Another suggestive verse from the Wisdom of Solomon 11.21 reads: ‘Thou hath disposed everything according to measure, number, and weight and measure’. The fifth-century theologian Apponius explicitly related this passage to geometry in his commentary on the Song of Songs: ‘The discipline of the geometrical and arithmetical art teaches that every creature is built according to measure and number’. 55 Alan of Lille, Theologicae regulae, no. 31. Several of Alan’s works were published in many editions before and slightly after 1500; the Regulae appeared in 1492 at Basel from the press of Jacob Wolff of Pforzheim. See E. J. Butterworth, ‘Form and Significance of the Sphere in Nicholas of Cusa’s De ludo globi’, in Nicholas of Cusa: In Search of God and Wisdom, Essays in Honor of Morimichi Watanabe by the American Cusanus Society, ed. by Gerald Christianson and Thomas Mizbicki (Leiden: Brill, 1991), pp. 89–100 (pp. 89–90); Françoise Hudry, ‘Introduction’, in Alain de Lille, Règles de théologie suivi de Sermon sur la sphère intelligible (Paris: Cerf, 1995), pp. 7–80; and Jean Jolivet, ‘Remarques sur les Regulae Theologicae d’Alain de Lille’, in Alain de Lille, Gautier de Châtillon, Jakemart Giélée et leur temps, ed. by H. Roussel and F. Suard (Lille: Centre d’études médiévales et dialectales, 1980), pp. 83–99. 52

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extolled regular two-dimensional figures and polyhedrons as the essential forms of the universe well into the sixteenth century. The Nuremberg goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer, for example, is careful to mention the Timaeus in the full title of his Perspectiva Corporum Regularium of 1568.56 Several fifteenth-century writers considered geometric terms and shapes characteristic of the ideal, abstracted language of divine thought and of the mechanism of creation. The most prominent, perhaps, was Nicholas of Cusa, for whom the curve and the straight line symbolized the dual nature of the universe: ‘circulus est figura perfecta unitatis et simplicitatis’ (‘the circle is the perfect figure of unity and simplicity’).57 In De docta ignorantia, Nicholas follows the well-trodden Platonic tradition in describing how God fashioned the world using geometry along with arithmetic, music, and astronomy.58 He likens his notion of the divine and infinite maximum absolutum to the interaction of geometric forms, and he expresses God’s relation to created matter in geometric terms.59 The French mathematician Charles de Bovelles expresses a rather similar view in his Liber de Sapiente (1510), which presents geometry as a guide in measuring the qualities of the Wenzel Jamnitzer, Perspectiva corporum regularium das is ein fleissige fürweisung wie di fünff Regulirten Cörper, darvon Plato in Timaeo und Euclides inn sein Elementis schribt (Nuremberg: s.n., 1568). The cosmology of the Timaeus is reflected in Proclus’s commentary on Euclid, revived in the fifteenth century, as it is in several such sixteenth-century tracts. See Martin J. Kemp, ‘Geometrical Bodies as Exemplary Forms in Renaissance Space’, in World Art: Themes of Unity in Diversity, Acts of the 25th International Congress of the History of Art, ed. by Irving Lavin, 3 vols (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), i, pp. 238–39. For Proclus’s discussion of geometry as an expression of divinity, see Proclus, A commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, trans. by G. R. Morrow (Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 1970), p. 16; and Hiscock, The Wise Master Builder, p. 115. On the Neoplatonic resonances in Proclus’s commentary on Euclid, see Jan Mueller, ‘Mathematics and Philosophy in Proclus’ Commentary on Book i of Euclid’s Elements’, in Proclus: Lecteur et interprète des anciens, actes du colloque international du CNRS, Paris, 2–4 October 1985, ed. by Jean Pépin and H. D. Saffrey (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1987), pp. 305–18. On interest in Proclus during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘Proclus as a Reader of Plato and Plotinus, and his Influence in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance’, in Proclus: Lecteur et interprète des anciens, pp. 191–211. 57 Nicholas Cusanus, Of Learned Ignorance, trans. by Germain Heron (New York: Routledge and K. Paul, 1954), p. 46 (Book i, Chapter 21); p. 51 (Book i, Chapter 23); and pp. 108–10 (Book ii, Chapter 11). One of the principal sources of this thought was Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius stated that the soul, through its perfect knowledge, might gaze on the perfect Platonic forms in heaven, but lost this wisdom and ability through its corporeal embodiment. Kepler much admired Nicholas of Cusa for his mystical elaborations on geometry. See Ferdinand Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler (New York: Zone Books, 1993), pp. 175–78. Nicholas’s works were published in a reliable edition by Martin Flach at Strasbourg in 1488. For Nicholas’s references to the circle and sphere as divine forms of the cosmos, see H. Lawrence Bond, ‘The Journey of the Soul to Body in Nicholas of Cusa’s De ludo globi’, in Nicholas of Cusa: In Search of God and Wisdom, pp. 81–83. The idea is taken by Nicholas from earlier theological treatises such as the Liber xxiv Philsosphorum. See Clemens Baeumker, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, vol. 25 Münster: Verlag der Aschendorffschen Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1928, p. 208. The tradition of sacred association with the circle is set out in Georges Poulet, The Metamorphosis of the Circle, trans. by Carley Dawson and Elliott Coleman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), pp. xi–xxvii; and Friedman, ‘The Architect’s Compass’, p. 421. 58 Nicholas of Cusa, Of Learned Ignorance, pp.  118–19 (Book ii, Chapter 13): ‘With arithmetic He adjusted it into unity, with geometry He gave it a balanced design upon which depends its stability and its power of controlled movement: with music He allotted its parts […] God has set up the elements in an admirable order, for He created all things in number, weight and measure. Number appertains to arithmetic, weight to music and measure to geometry’. Nicholas further insists that ‘mathematics is a very great help in the understanding of different divine truths’. By mathematics, he meant primarily geometry. In order to reach the divine and infinite ‘absolute maximum’, it was necessary to deal with ‘finite mathematical figures’. See Nicholas of Cusa, Of Learned Ignorance, p. 26 (Book i, Chapter 11). In this chapter, Nicholas goes on to state that ‘Boethius, the most learned of Romans, went so far as to say that knowledge of things divine was impossible without some knowledge of mathematics’. He elaborates further: ‘In so far as they have followed him [Pythagoras], the Platonists and the chief of our own philosophers, like Augustine and later Boethius, have not hesitated to assert that number was the essential exemplar in the mind of the Creator of all things to be created’. On the importance of Greek mathematics and Platonic literature in the work of Nicholas of Cusa, see Ernst Hoffmann, Cusanus-Studien, i, Das Universum des Nikolaus von Cues, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wisserschaften, Philosophish-historische, Klasse, 3 (Heidelberg: Winer, 1929–30), pp. 5–34. 59 Nicholas of Cusa, Of Learned Ignorance, p. 51 (Book i, Chapter 23). 56

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Trinity.60 These Platonic concepts found their way into popular vernacular texts, a measure of their broad currency.61 Particularly faithful is Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s well-known encyclopaedia, which, though written in the thirteenth century, was published throughout Europe in both Latin and vernacular editions around 1500.62 In his chapter on heavenly bodies, which openly credits the Timaeus, Bartholomaeus asserts that a spherical, circular shape was most appropriate for the world as a sign of the ‘perfection of all things’.63 More significantly, the circle is directly associated with the divine act of creation in his chapter on the figures of the senses.64 Platonic currents in late medieval culture thus encouraged a reading of geometric figures as archetypal identities, as perfect and essential forms. Reducing objects to mathematical properties purged them of the specifics of their material manifestation and approached the divine blueprint. Nicholas of Cusa, for example, expresses this concept when he speaks of ideal forms descending to enjoy a limited existence in matter.65 He is clearest on this point in the dialogue De ludo globi, in which one speaker asserts: ‘Sic nulla forma est vera in materia, sed veritatis tantum imago verae formae, cum veritas formae sit ab omni

Charles de Bovelles, Le Livre du sage, ed. and trans. by Pierre Magnard (Paris: J. Vrin, 1982), p. 198. Exemplary is Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pilgrimage of Human Life. In the first book, a geometric figure is introduced as an image of divine legacy. Christ’s ‘testament of peace’ is illustrated by a right-angle ‘carpenter’s square’ — ‘a jewel formed and shaped by my father’. A diagram is provided in the text, and the reader is instructed to label its parts. Geometric properties, critical to the design, guarantee its truth and authority. See De Deguileville, The Pilgrimage of Human Life, trans. by Eugene Clasby, Garland Library of Medieval Literature: Series B, lxxvi (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), pp. 34–35, verses 2512–79. This work, composed shortly before 1350, continued to enjoy a significant vogue in the fifteenth and sixteenth century and was published in both French and Spanish editions; there exist several fifteenth-century manuscript editions of this work as well. A Spanish translation, El pelegrino dela vida humana, was printed at Toulouse in 1490 by Heinrich Mayer. French editions were issued at Paris by Bertold Rembolt and Jean Petit (1500 and 1515) and Antoine Vérard (1511). On the popularity of De Deguileville’s pèlerinages in England in the fifteenth century, see Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 20. 62 The encyclopaedia was first published in Latin at Basel in 1470 and continued to be printed in numerous Latin and vernacular editions into the seventeenth century. 63 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum (Westminster: Wyken de Worde, c.  1495), Chapter 10: ‘Thenne as Marcianus sayth, the worlde is an unyversall gaderynge togider of thynges whiche ben made and all rou[n]de as it were a spere other a belle. For the utter partye of the worlde hathe shape and liknesse of a spere & of a cercle. And as Marcianus sayth there was noo shape neyther lkyeness so covenable to the worlde as a rounde lykness and shape and that for perfeccyon of all thynges. And for the lykenesse that the worlde hath in everlastinge beynge with his werker that is wythoute ende and without begynnynge’. Plato’s Timaeus is mentioned by name at the end of this passage, which treats God’s imparting of form to inchoate matter. ‘Marcianus’ refers to the fifth-century philosopher Martianus Capellus, whose principal work, De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae, was one of the most popular Latin texts on logic during the Middle Ages. See Hiscock, The Wise Master Builder, p. 62. 64 Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum (Frankfurt: Wolfgang Richter, 1601), Book xix, Chapter 127, 1235: ‘universitatis etiam conditor, scilicet Deus in circulo designator’. See Freedman, ‘The Architect’s Compass’, p. 421. 65 Nicholas of Cusa, The Layman on Wisdom and the Mind, trans. by M. L. Führer (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1989), p. 103. As we might expect, both Plato and Boethius are cited by name in this work (pp. 65–67, 89). See, too, Cusa, Of Learned Ignorance, p.  58 (Book iii, Chapter 10): ‘An intelligence is above time and unsubjected to temporal corruption, for by its nature it embraces within itself incorruptible forms. Such, for example, are the abstractions of mathematics — and even of physical things, which the mind buries in itself and readily transforms into abstractions or spiritual realities. All this is to us an indication of the mind’s own incorruptibility, for the habitat and natural container of incorruptible things must itself be incorruptible. Now this intellect has a natural movement towards the most abstract truth as being the end of all its desires and its final and most delectable object. Now this ultimate object is in all things, for it is God; and the immortal and incorruptible human intelligence is insatiable till it attains him, for it is satisfied only with an eternal object’. A similar notion of the division between material objects and divine ideas is expressed by Charles de Bovelles, who writes of ‘the perceptible signs that make known the divine and most high trinity’. See Bovelles, Le Livre du sage, p. 191. 60 61

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materia separata’ (‘Thus materialized, no form is true, but rather only an image of the truth of true form, since the truth of form is separated from all material’).66 The inclination to seek analogy between geometry and the divine was much more than a set of postulates with a scholastic pedigree. It was a habit of mind, deeply entrenched, that is revealed in both learned and popular texts. A belief in the cosmic significance of numerical relationships — extrapolated in space as geometry; extrapolated in time as music — was so widely held and resonant that it remained a constant potential reference.67 The View from Eternity Gothic ornament might signal divine temporal as well as spatial planning. The carved narrative altarpieces of the Netherlands became ever more structurally complex throughout the early sixteenth century. While many early examples array a mere three compartments, later altarpieces from the 1520s, 30s, and 40s often had three or more rows of narrative episodes. This is especially true of Antwerp altarpieces, culminating in the Antwerp Passion altarpiece in Dortmund, the so-called Golden Wonder of 1521 (Figure  11).68 This retable, with its corpus and wings carved and gilded, presented with its open face thirty different scenes to the viewer. The gilded geometric tracery, with its golden sheen, brilliantly announces its presence and provides a consistent and all-encompassing frame for the different moments in sacred history. Nicholas of Cusa, De ludo globi, in Philosophisch-theologische Schriften, ed.  by Leo Gabriel, trans. by Dietlind and Wilhelm Dupré, 3 vols (Vienna: Herder, 1964), iii, p. 231. Boethius had expressed a similar distinction between a higher world of ideas and a lower material realm in De arithmetica (ii.31): ‘Thus it is known to us, that just as it is in this matter, so in the world are things joined together. Either things are of the same immutable proper substance, as are God, the soul, or the mind, or whatever is blessed with incorporality by its own nature, or they are of a variable and mutable nature, which we undoubtedly see is the case in corporeal things’. See Hiscock, The Wise Master Builder, p. 87. This use of geometry as a concentrated sign of the higher realm of divine thought is in keeping with views of earlier writers such as the popular Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, whose works were extensively published with commentaries in the late fifteenth and sixteenth century. In De ecclesiastica hierarchia (2.iii.2), Dionysius typically insists that ‘sacred symbols are actually the perceptible tokens of the conceptual things’. In De coelesti hierarchia (1.3), he explains, ‘He revealed all this to us in the sacred pictures of the scriptures so that he might lift us in spirit up through the perceptible to the conceptual, from sacred shapes and symbols to the simple peaks of the hierarchies of heaven’. See Hiscock, The Wise Master Builder, p.  123. De caelesti hierarchia and De ecclesiastica hierarchia were published separately at Paris (1498 and 1515) and Strasbourg (1502). Editions of collected works containing these treatises were published at Bruges (c. 1478), Paris (1498 and 1515), Strasbourg (1502 and 1503), and Basel (1539). The Latin translation is generally that of Ambrose the Camaldule from the early fifteenth century, though in Northern Europe, Marcilio Ficino’s newer translation was issued at Strasbourg in 1503. Commentaries by such notables as Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Judocus Clichtoveus accompanied Dionysius’s texts. 67 H.  Junecke, Die wohlbemessene Ordnung, Pathagorieische Proportionen in der Historischen Architektur (Berlin: Der Beeken, 1982); and Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World, pp. 21, 57, 173. Plato’s understanding of cosmological harmony in music in the Timaeus was important for Augustine, who posits a similar interpretation in Book vi of De musica. Boethius likewise conceived of music as a measure of divine order in his own treatise, De musica, which endured as an authoritative text until the Renaissance. See Hiscock, The Wise Master Builder, pp. 65, 77–78. For Nicholas of Cusa’s reference to music as a measure of divine harmony, see Cusa, Of Learned Ignorance, p. 68 (Book ii, Chapter 1): ‘Consequently the most perfect, faultless harmony cannot be perceived by the ear, for it exists not in things sensible but only as an ideal conceived by the mind. From this we can form some idea of the most perfect or infinite harmony, which is a relation in equality. No man can hear it while still in the body, for it is wholly spiritual and would draw to itself the essence of the soul, as infinite light would attract all light to itself. Such infinitely perfect harmony, in consequence, would be heard only in ecstasy by the ear of the intellect, once the soul was free from the things of sense’. 68 Das ‘Goldene Wunder’ in der Dortmunder Petrikirche: Bildgebrauch und Bildproduktion im Mittelalter, ed. by Barbara Welzen and others (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2004). 66

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Fig. 11: Antwerp workshop of Jan Gillisz Wraghe, Passion Altarpiece (the ‘Golden Wonder’), c. 1521, Dortmund, Petrikirche. Photo: Fotostudio Glahs.

This movement toward ever more complicated organization goes against the general tendency toward spatial unification we find in painted altarpieces of the period. We might take as an example Joos van Cleve’s Crucifixion Triptych from the early 1520s, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York (Figure 12).69 Although the saints on the wings and the donor by the cross occupy a different time from Christ, Mary, and the Evangelist, all are situated in a continuous space represented as a landscape that spreads unbroken across all three panels. Temporal relations are here construed quite differently from the way they are apprehended in carved altarpieces like those in Lübeck, Vreden, and Dortmund. Time, of course, was not one thing or notion in the early modern world — no more than it is today. There was, for instance, the slow, cyclical ebb and flow of seasonal time, and stable eschatological time, but there was also what Jacques Le Goff and others have called merchant time — the commodification of time in cities set to the nearly continuous production of goods.70 The rapid spread of clocks made time almost a personal possession. John Oliver Hand, Joos van Cleve: The Complete Paintings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 56–57, 137, no. 40: Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. No. 41.190.20A–C. For a discussion of early sixteenth-century painted triptychs, see Jacobs, Opening Doors, pp. 220–51. 70 Jacques Le Goff, ‘Au Moyen Âge: Temps de ľéglise et temps du marchand’, Annales, Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 15 (1960), 417–33; Jacques LeGoff, ‘Le Temps du travail dans la crise du XlVe siècle: Du temps médiéval au temps moderne’, Le Moyen Âge, 69  (1963), 597–613; A.  J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. by G.  L. Campbell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 141–50; and Max Engrammare, L’Ordre du temps: L’Invention de la ponctualité au xvie siècle (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2004). 69

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Fig. 12: Joos van Cleve, Crucifixion Triptych. c. 1525, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: author.

As Leon Battista Alberti stated, ‘Ora avete figliuoli miei l’operazioni dell’animo, del corpo et del tempo, tre cose da natura nostre et proprie […] voi medesimi potete pensarvi et troverete il tempo essere cosa molto preziosa’ (‘[…] There are three things which a man may call his own property — his soul, his body and […] the most valuable of all things […] time’).71 Instruments for measuring time — calendars, chronicles, clocks, etc. — were diverse, and each, in effect, created a different kind of time. The concept of time as a set of neutral coordinates measuring simple duration thus competed with the comprehension of time as a series of meaningful and interrelated events arranged according to design. As A. J. Gurevich has written, life unfolded on two temporal planes at once: on the empirical and transient plane of earthly existence, and on the plane of the realization of God’s predestined plan. Augustine expresses this nicely in stating that history reveals itself in the shadow of the future (‘huic ergo umbrae futuri non propter ipsam, sed propter illud, quod praefigurabat, tanta ueneratio exhibebatur’).72 There were various schemas for dividing history into ages or epochs, but at the centre of time stood the Incarnation and the Passion, preceded by the era of the Old Testament and followed by all subsequent occurrences. The time of Christ was distinct, for it was always present in some sense and never receded into the distant regions of the past. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, p. 150. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, pp. 16–17; and Augustine, Sancti Aureli Augustini episcopi De civitate Dei libri 22, ed. by Bernardus Dombart and Alfonsus Kalb (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1993), Book xvii, Chapter 6, l. 37. For scriptural precedents, see Paul in Colossians 2.16–17: ‘Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ’ (nemo ergo vos iudicet in cibo aut in potu aut in parte diei festi aut neomeniae aut sabbatorum quae sunt umbra futurorum corpus autem Christi). 71 72

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With Christ, time began anew. His Life and Passion offered the ever-present promise of salvation and remained always current. Alfred Gell has remarked on this peculiar property of Christian belief: It is wholly beside the point to introduce the issue of increasing durational interval between  […] the New Testament epoch, and the present day, when the symbolic salience of the events attributed to these epochs depends precisely on the fact that they are unaffected by the intervening lapse of time.73

Or, as the twelfth-century theologian Peter Lombard put it: ‘Utrum debeat dici “semper gignitur Filius” vel “semper genitus est”’ (‘One would have to say that Christ is always being born or has been born’).74 As we have seen, the extensive traceried skeleton of the altarpieces could suggest the web of time — a visual register of God’s plan. The Infancy and Passion of Christ and the Life of the Virgin are divided into significant episodes, each sequestered in its own compartment; the figures in these enclaves are only aware of their immediate surrounds, and we imagine their actions occurring in familiar durational time. But to the eye of God, all events transpire in an eternal present — out of time. This was very much the view of Augustine and especially Boethius, whose writings on time were revived at the end of the Middle Ages. ‘Just as you see certain things in your temporary present’, says Boethius, ‘so does [God] see all things in his eternal one’.75 Augustine pronounces similarly: ‘It is in eternity, which is supreme over time, because it is a never-ending present, that you are at once before all past time and after all future time’.76 Such was the vantage point of Heaven. Again, Augustine: ‘How far you are in your eternity by reflecting that the Heaven of Heavens, which is your dwelling, nevertheless is free from all vicissitudes of time’.77 It was clearly important for later theologians like Aquinas to free God from the constraints of durational time — to set him above and apart from any system that might limit his omnipotence — and pains were taken to refute opposing theories. In fact, the contentious issue of God’s foreknowledge of future and contingent events was the subject of heated discussion precisely at the time that many of the ­Netherlandish altarpieces were made.

Gell, The Anthropology of Time, p. 22. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, p. 120; and Chenu, Théologie au douzième siècle (Paris, J. Vrin, 1957), p. 93. There was, of course, a scriptural basis for this sort of pronouncement in Revelations 1.8: ‘I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty’. See John Spencer Hill, Infinity, Faith and Time: Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature (Montreal: McGill and Queens’s University Press, 1997), p. 72. 75 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. by S.  J. Tester (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 426–27 (Book v, Prose 6, lines 77–80). 76 ‘Sed praecedis omnia praeterita celsitudine semper praesentis aeternitatis, et superas omnia futura, quia illa futura sunt, et cum venerint, praeterita erunt; tu autem idem ipse es, et anni tui non deficient’. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. by R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961; repr. 1982), p. 261 (Book xi, § 13). On Augustine’s notion of time and eternity, see Geneviève Lloyd, ‘Augustine and the “Problem” of Time’, in The Augustinian Tradition, ed. by Gareth B. Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 39–60 (esp. pp. 56–59). 77 Augustine, Confessions, p. 288 (Book xii, § 11). 73 74

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How, indeed, could God know the future without foreordaining future events? How could free will exist if future acts were effectively predetermined?78 This longstanding problem became one of the central issues of the Reformation and was memorably aired in a debate over free will that pitted Luther against a somewhat reluctant Erasmus. Although Erasmus came out strongly for free will, he had long considered related ideas — like the ‘absolute necessity’ of human actions — inappropriate for open discussion.79 Luther, however, would have nothing of mechanisms like contingency that qualified God’s knowledge and determination of the future: Est itaque et hoc imprimis necessarium et salutare Christiano, nosse, quod Deus nihil praescit contigenter, sed quod omnia incommutabili et aeterna infallibilique voluntate et praevidet et proponit, et facit. Hoc fulmine sternitur et conteritur penitus liberum arbitrium. [It is] fundamentally necessary and salutary for a Christian to know that God foreknows nothing contingently, but that he foresees and purposes and does all things by his immutable, eternal, and infallible will. Here is a thunderbolt by which free choice is completely prostrated and shattered.80

Medieval philosophers who delved into this issue were forced, intellectually and institutionally, to reckon with Aristotle, who had denied that the future was in any way knowable.81 Many, like Augustine, countered this stance by insisting that God did not distinguish between past and future: ‘Apud Deum autem nihil deest, nec praeteritum igitur nec futurum, sed omne praesens est apud Deum’ (‘For God, nothing is absent, neither the past nor the future, but everything is present to God’).82

J. B. Korolec, ‘Free Will and Free Choice’, in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600, ed. by Norman Kretzmann and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp.  629–41; Calvin Normore, ‘Divine Omniscience, Omnipotence and Future Contingents: An Overview’, in Divine Omniscience and Omnipotence in Medieval Philosophy: Islamic, Jewish, and Christian Perspectives, ed. by Tamar Rudavsky (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), pp. 3–22; Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); God, Foreknowledge, and Freedom, ed.  by John Martin Fischer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); and Chris Schabel, Theology at Paris, 1316–1345: Peter Auriol and the Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents, Ashgate Studies in Medieval Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 1. 79 James D. Tracy, ‘Introduction’, in Erasmus and Luther: The Battle over Free Will, ed. by Clarence H. Miller, trans. by Clarence H. Miller and Peter Macardle (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2012), pp. ix–xxviii (p. xxv). Much of the debate cantered on Paul and Augustine, with Erasmus arguing that both authors required interpretation. To this end, he drew on a variety of traditional voices, from early Christian authorities like Irenaeus and Origen to scholastics like Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Yet Erasmus’s ambivalence toward the project shows in his continual weighing of opposing opinions and his meticulous dissection of terms like ‘grace’. He clearly prefers a definite if minimal role for free will, though, like Augustine, he seems at times to doubt its efficacy in achieving salvation. In the end, he would have liked to avoid the question. See Erasmus and Luther, pp. 7–11, 29, 198, 204, 210, 211, 215, 240, 319. 80 Tracy, ‘Introduction’, p. xxv; and Martin Luther, De servo arbitrio, in Luther’s Works, ed. by Jaroslav Pelikan and others, 55 vols (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1958–86), xxxiii, p. 37. 81 The principal reference was to chapter nine of Aristotle’s De Interpretatione, known as the Peri Hermeneias. William Lane Craig, ‘Thomas Aquinas’, in The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez (Leiden: Brill, 1988), pp. 1–58; Jean Isaac, Le Peri hermeneias en occident de Boèce à Saint Thomas: Histoire littéraire d’un traité d’Aristote (Paris, J. Vrin, 1953); and Schabel, Theology at Paris, pp. 17–18. 82 Schabel, Theology at Paris, pp. 21–22; and Hill, Infinity, Faith and Time, p. 72. In his later writings, however, Augustine sharply circumscribed the role of free will. 78

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From the mid-thirteenth century on, Boethius’s position on divine foreknowledge took centre stage in the dispute.83 Like the young Augustine, Boethius attempted to evade the inconvenient consequences of God’s foreknowledge by removing God from all temporal distinctions: since God saw everything in an eternal present,84 what He possessed was simply knowledge and not foreknowledge.85 In the everlasting instant of the present, God sees all things that will happen as if they have already occurred.86 Boethius was untroubled by apparent contradictions to this formulation, since he considered human reason unable to comprehend the temporal dimension of divine causality. God’s knowledge was true; things occurred out of necessity. But God’s knowledge of the future did not alter what for us is the uncertainty of future events: ‘Id autem est, quonam modo etiam quae certos exitus non habent certa tamen uideat ac definite praenotio, neque id sit opinio sed summae potius scientiae nullis terminis inclusa simplicitas’ (‘[A] certain and definite foreknowledge can behold even those things which have no certain outcome. And this foreknowledge was no mere conjecture by the unrestricted simplicity of [God’s] supreme knowledge’).87 Key to this discussion were the notions of ‘contingency’, ‘simplicity’, and ‘necessity’. Boethius held that God’s firm knowledge of future events did not render them ‘necessary’ to us: God beholds those future events which happen because of the freedom of the will, as present; they therefore, related to the divine perception, become necessary through the condition of divine knowledge, but considered in themselves do not lose the absolute freedom of their nature.88

Boethius’s views found an important champion in Aquinas, who likewise maintained that God did not exist in time.89 The Dominican theologian addressed God’s foreknowledge by citing Boethius’s conviction that all knowledge was proper to the one who knows.90 He conceded that future contingents for us remain undetermined. But for God in eternity, all things exist in that eternal present and have ‘determinate truth’: ‘Since therefore God is eternal, it is necessary that His cognition involve the mode of eternity, which is complete

Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen, ‘The Transition of Academic knowledge: Scholasticism in the Ghent Boethius (1485) and Other Commentaries on the Consolatio’, in Boethius in the Middle Ages: Latin and Vernacular Traditions of the Consolatio philosophiae, ed. by Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen and Lodi Nauta (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 167–214 (p. 183). 84 For the various medieval definitions of eternity (aeternitas) as distinct from aevum, see Rory Fox, Time and Eternity in Mid-Thirteenth-Century Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 282–308. 85 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, pp. 426–27 (Book v, Prose 6, lines 64–73): ‘So if you should wish to consider his foreknowledge, by which he discerns all things, you will more rightly judge it to be not foreknowledge as it were of the future but knowledge of a never-passing instant. And therefore it is called not prevision but providence, because set far from the lowest of things it looks forward on all things as though from the highest peak of the world’; and Schabel, Theology at Paris, p. 23. 86 Hoenen, ‘The Transition of Academic Knowledge’, p. 186; and Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, 423–35 (Book v, Prose 6). 87 Schabel, Theology at Paris, p.  23; and Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, pp.  418–20 (Book v, Prose 5, lines 52–55). I borrow Schabel’s translation. 88 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, pp. 430–31 (Book v, Prose 6, lines 115–20); and Schabel, Theology at Paris, p. 24. 89 Fox, Time and Eternity, pp.  311, 323. For Aquinas’s interest in Boethius, see J.  F. Wippel, Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas, Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, 10 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1984), pp. 245–48. 90 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, pp. 412–15 (Book v, Metre 4). 83

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being, all at once, without succession’.91 Later Dominicans tended to support and refine Aquinas’s views, but there were many opposing voices. Much of the debate was conducted between the Dominicans and the Franciscans and inevitably took on sectarian overtones. Boethius’s beliefs concerning foreknowledge were attacked most notably by the Franciscans Robert Grosseteste and Bonaventure.92 Indeed, during the late thirteenth century, the Dominicans were on the defensive.93 The debate came to a head in the fourteenth century. The discussion was highly complex, involving close logical analysis of the grammatical structures and modalities of scriptural and traditional texts. Yet very few of the participants came down decisively on the issue as Luther and Calvin were to do. One of the principal adversaries of the view held by Boethius and Aquinas was the Franciscan Peter Auriol, who had become professor of theology at the University of Paris in 1318. Auriol utterly denied the notion of contingency. Auriol insisted, rather, that there is no (future) possibility in God; He is constant and unchanging for us and in Eternity. His will is necessarily transformed into a determined act, and any possibility of alternative future states would require imperfection in God.94 Yet in his treatment of predestination, Auriol nevertheless tried to preserve the notions of both free will and divine omnipotence. To this end, he distinguished between God’s intrinsic and extrinsic will — and here Auriol invoked the notion of ‘complacency’. Addressing the issue of contingent alternatives that had been raised by Duns Scotus, Auriol maintained that God’s intrinsic will embraced alternative and mutually contradictory choices with equal satisfaction, with divine complacency. God is equally pleased by whatever outcome is realized.95 Auriol’s propositions continued to draw support. Leuven, 1465 During the earlier stages of altarpiece production, a major controversy erupted in the Low Countries over theories of foreknowledge and foreordination that quickly claimed the attention of European leaders. In 1465, Peter de Rivo, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Leuven and defender of Auriol´s ideas, suddenly found himself accused of heresy. His opponent was Henry of Zomeren, a professor of theology at Paris. Rivo insisted that one could logically believe in God’s foreknowledge ‘without believing that truth ‘Quod qualiter sit, evidenter docet Boethius in fine De Consol., lib. V, prosa ult […] “Omnis enim cognito est secundum modum cognoscentis”, ut dictum est. Cum igitur Deus sit aeternus, oportet quod cognitio eius modum aeternitatis habeat, qui est esse totum simul sine successione’. M. Th. Liske, ‘Was meint Thomas von Aquin mit “Gott Weiss das Künftige als gegenwärtig”?’, Theologie und Philosophie, 60 (1985), 520–37; and Schabel, Theology at Paris, pp. 34–35. Aquinas carefully distinguished between first and proximate causes (God being the first cause and necessary; effects being proximate and not necessary). See also Craig, ‘Thomas Aquinas’, pp. 99–126; and Harm J. M. J. Goris, Free Creatures of an Eternal God: Thomas Aquinas on God’s Infallible Foreknowledge and Irresistible Will (Leuven: Peeters, 1996). 92 Hoenen, ‘The Transition of Academic knowledge’, pp. 183–84. 93 D. Odon Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux xiie et xiii e siècles, i, Problèmes de Psychologie (Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1957), p. 387; and Nauta, ‘The Scholastic Context of the Boethius Commentary by Nicholas Trevet’, in Boethius in the Middle Ages, pp. 41–67 (p. 59). The views of Aquinas, though, were supported by the younger Franciscan Duns Scotus (1266–1308) who adopted a slightly different strategy. For Scotus, God wills contingently and thus knows contingently. In the instant that is Eternity, God can both will and know alternatives to what he actually wills, allowing, in effect, for an undetermined future. See Schabel, Theology at Paris, pp. 77–78. 94 Schabel, Theology at Paris, pp.  90–124; and James Halverson, Peter Aureol on Predestination: A  Challenge to Late Medieval Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1998), p. 188. 95 Schabel, Theology at Paris, pp. 124–30. 91

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actually inheres in the proposition’, while Zomeren supported this very truth value of God’s foreknowledge and prophesy. The Faculty of Arts (Rivo’s faculty) was ultimately convinced by Rivo’s arguments and asked the university to prohibit Zomeren’s statements. But the university, sensing the passions aroused over an issue that could not effectively be resolved, pleaded with all parties to end the discussion. Zomeren refused, holding a series of lectures defending his views in early 1470 — to which Rivo responded in kind. Rivo’s presentation was interrupted by a student, whose disciplinary hearing threatened to turn violent. Once again the university counselled all parties to cease their debate.96 But the dispute soon spread beyond the bounds of Leuven University. Present at one of Rivo’s lectures was Guillaume Fillastre, Bishop of Tournai and Chancellor of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Zomeren, in turn, pled his case to the eminent Cardinal Bessarion in Rome and was seemingly exonerated when the Faculty of Theology at Paris cleared him of heresy.97 Yet the faculty at Cologne supported Rivo and the University of Leuven followed suit. Zomeren then raised the ante. He solicited assistance from Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and sought greater patronage in Rome — notably from Cardinal Francesco delle Rovere who later, as Pope Sixtus IV, condemned several of Rivo’s propositions (particularly those dealing with the truth of future contingents).98 Shortly after this quarrel, three editions of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy were printed in the Low Countries, the first publications of the text in these territories. In 1477, Colard Mansion at Bruges issued an edition in French; seven years later, Johannes of Westphalia released a Latin edition at Leuven itself.99 The first printed Dutch translation appeared in 1485 from Arend de Keysere at Ghent in a bilingual version that paired the vernacular and Latin texts.100 The Ghent publication proved enormously popular and influential. De Keysere issued his Consolation in a large printing, most likely of around 300 copies, of which nearly sixty survive today. The volume was produced in two variants: a luxury edition on expensive paper, with initials, rubrics, and painted miniatures heading each book, and a bare-bones edition on rough paper without the manual additions. The volume immediately attracted the elite. Lodewijk of Gruuthuse, who distrusted printed books, commissioned two manuscript copies of the Ghent Boethius, and Philip of Burgundy purchased a printed version, later acquired by Antoine de Lalaing, Count of Hoogstraten.101 Inscriptions in extant copies, however, show that the book was owned by Schabel, Theology at Paris, pp. 286–324; and Paul Frédericq, ‘L’Hérésie à Louvain vers 1470’, in Bulletin de la classe des Lettres et de la classe des Beaux-Arts (Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1905), pp. 11–77. 97 As Schabel, Theology at Paris, p. 329 notes, universities at the time frequently took official positions on theological matters as a means of self-promotion, staking intellectual ground for themselves that might lead to charges of heresy levelled against other universities. 98 Schabel, Theology at Paris, pp. 324–36. 99 Le Livre de boece de consolation de phylosophye (Bruges: Colard Mansion, 1477); and De consolatione philosophiae (Leuven: Johannes de Westfalia, 1481). 100 De consolatione philosophiae (Ghent: Arend de Keysere, 1485); and Jocobus Martinus Hoek, De middelnedersandse vertalingen van Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, met een overzicht van de andere nederlandse en niet-nederlandse vertalingen (Harderwijk: Flevo, 1943). The first (Middle-)Dutch translation of the Consolation appears to be by Joos de Vilt, a Bruges goldsmith, and to date from the 1460s. It exists in a manuscript dated 1470 and is considered a cumbersome and inexact translation that relies primarily on a much older French version rather than on the Latin original. There is some thought, however, that de Keysere’s text may predate that of Vilt. See Hoenen, ‘The Transition of Academic knowledge’, pp. 122–25; and Jerome Machiels, Meester Arend de Keysere 1480–1490 (Ghent: HIGRO, 1973), pp. 13–44, esp. p. 44. 101 Gegevens betreffende roerend en onroerend bezit in de Nederlanden in de 16e eeuw, ed. by H. A. Enno van Gelder, Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatien, grote serie, 140 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), p. 28; and Goris and Wissink, ‘The Medieval Dutch Tradition’, in Boethius in the Middle Ages, p. 155. 96

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varied strata of the population: clerics and townspeople as well as nobles. It remained an esteemed item long after 1500; the philosopher and engraver Dirck Volckertsz. Coornhert relied extensively on the Dutch text of the Ghent Boethius for his own translation of the Consolation of 1557.102 All three Netherlandish editions of the Consolation were accompanied by extensive commentaries that supported the views on eternity and foreknowledge espoused by Boethius and Aquinas. Johannes of Westphalia’s Latin publication, in fact, included a commentary ascribed to Saint Thomas himself; this ‘Pseudo-Aquinas’ exegesis most likely dates from the third quarter of the fifteenth century.103 It sanctions the Platonic aspects of Boethius’s text and owes a considerable debt to the highly popular commentary on the Consolation by Nicholas Trevet, a Dominican who joined in his brothers’ defence of Aquinas against the Franciscans.104 Mansion’s French version contained the commentary by Reinier of Saint Truiden that likewise toed the Thomist line. But the most interesting of these expositions was the anonymous, vernacular commentary integrated with the Boethian text in the Ghent publication of 1485.105 This expansive analysis endorses a number of important postulates, notably that all past and (contingent) future things are known to God in the presence of his eternity through knowledge of their causes. The author of the commentary uses the scholastic phrase ‘in hare moghelicheit van gheschiene of causen’ (knowing through the causes) to show that God knows the future because he knows what will cause it to happen.106 The Ghent commentator corroborates Boethius and Aquinas in other significant ways: he grants that God’s knowledge of things, even of contingent future things, confers necessity on them. But he distinguishes between ‘absolute’ and ‘contingent’ necessity and states in a manner consistent with Boethius (and one that allows for free will) that ‘contingent’ events remain indeterminate.107 God knows everything in the presence of his eternity, 102 Die vertroestinghe der wyssheyt, tot troest van den bedroeffden raedt vanden onverstandigen und int gemeen tot alder

menschen salicheit / Boethius; wt den Latyne verduydischt, unde nu nyen gedruct, trans. by Dirck Volckertsz. Coornhert (Deventer: Symon Steenberch, 1557); Goris and Wissink, ‘The Medieval Dutch Tradition’, pp.  155–60; Hoek, De middelnedersandse vertalingen van Boethius’ De consolation philosophiae, p. 38; W. P. Gerritsen, ‘Viermaal Boethius. Poëticale en prosodische aspecten van de carmina in Boethius’ Consolatio in de vertalingen van Vilt (1466) tot Coornhert (1585)’, in Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, new series, 1 (1981), pp. 1–14; and W. P. Gerritsen, ‘Coornhert and Boethius: A Side-Light on the Genesis of Dutch Renaissance Verse’, in From Wolfram and Petrarch to Goethe and Grass: Studies in Literature in Honour of Leonard Forster, ed. by D. H. Green and others (BadenBaden: V. Koerner, 1982), pp. 307–22. Lodewijk of Gruuthuse commissioned Jan van Krieckenborch to copy the Ghent publication manually in 1492. The Lord of Gruuthuse owned only six manuscripts in Dutch. Coornhert later made a second and more accurate translation of the Consolation. 103 The Pseudo-Aquinas commentator insists that God knows all things ‘presently’ but that the ‘present’ to God in Eternity is not the same as the ‘present’ to those on earth. Denys the Carthusian makes the same points in his roughly contemporary commentary. Hoenen, ‘The Transition of Academic knowledge’, pp. 192–94. 104 Nauta, ‘The Scholastic Context of the Boethius Commentary by Nicholas Trevet’, in Boethius in the Middle Ages, pp. 41–67. Trevet’s commentary supported Boethius’s Platonic interpretation of human cognition, of the primacy of reason, and of the will’s dependence on external stimuli — issues of great importance in the debate on free will. 105 M. P. Angenent, ‘Het Gentse Boethiuscommentaar en Reinier van Sint-Truiden’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 107 (1991), 274–310. The Ghent commentary is largely an original work, though it draws on the commentaries by the Pseudo-Aquinas, William of Conches and, especially faithfully, on that by Reinier of St  Truiden. For Reinier of St Truiden, see A. Parrin, ‘Reinerus van St.-Truiden, rector van de Latijnse School te Mechelen (circa 1370) en commentator van Boëthius De consolation philosophiae’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 44 (1982), 298–319. 106 De consolatio philosophiae (Ghent: Arend de Keysere, 1485), fol. S3vb (Book v, Prose 6); and Hoenen, ‘The Transition of Academic knowledge’, p. 190. 107 Hoenen, ‘The Transition of Academic knowledge’, pp.  198–202; and De consolatio philosophiae (Ghent: Arend de Keysere, 1485), fols S6va–b, T1rb (Book v, Prose 6).

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but his manner of knowing is different from human knowledge. Thus people may act freely, changing at will their actions, though God knows their every deviation.108 The Netherlandish editions of the Consolation must also be seen as a local manifestation of much wider European esteem for the work and for Boethius’s positions. At least sixty editions appeared before 1500, often with extensive commentaries, and the book continued to be published into the sixteenth century and beyond.109 It was a notable object of study in grammar schools and a topic of lectures in German universities.110 Johannes Murmellius, the Netherlandish school teacher and rector, wrote a commentary on the Consolation aimed at younger students that was published with Boethius’s text in Deventer in 1514. Though Lorenzo Valla famously denigrated the author, Boethius was admired by many humanists.111 One of the factors behind the revival of Boethius’s notion of time and eternity, at least in the Low Countries, seems to have been the rise of popular mysticism that held little stock with earlier scholastic distinctions and official positions.112 Steven Ozment, in fact, has called attention to the essentially anti-intellectual and anti-institutional character of late medieval mysticism.113 Fifteenth-century authors in the Netherlands drew partly on the works of older mystics like Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler who discussed time and eternity in markedly different ways from Aquinas and his detractors; their views stand outside of the traditional discourse on foreknowledge and determination.114 Although Eckhart integrated notions of time drawn from Boethius, Augustine, and Aquinas, he focused on a super-rational understanding of the proximity of the soul to God. For Eckhart, time was the domain of finite and limited existence, entirely dependent on God who precedes time itself. The soul escapes these restrictions and rests ‘on the edge of time and eternity’. Eckhart speaks of the ‘fullness of time’, by which he means the union of the creation and the incarnation that are present in every moment. The instant in which past, present, and future meet is for him the moment in which God is born in the soul.115

108 De consolatio philosophiae (Ghent: Arend de Keysere, 1485), fols T2vb–T4vb (Book v, Prose 6); and Hoenen, ‘The Transition of Academic knowledge’, pp. 207–10. The Ghent commentator treats the subject of divine foreknowledge and foreordination at considerable length, often citing Aquinas and the commentary by Reinier of St Truiden. 109 Nauta, ‘Some Aspects of Boethius’ Consolatio philosohiae in the Renaissance’, in Boèce ou la chaîne des savoirs. Actes du colloque international de la fondation Singer-Polignac, ed. by A. Galonnier (Leuven and Paris: Peeters, 2003), pp. 767–78 (p. 769). 110 Nauta, ‘Some Aspects’, pp. 769–70. Records show that Boethius’s Consolation was the subject of university lectures at Erfurt, Prague, and Vienna. 111 Nauta, ‘A Humanist Reading of Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae: The Commentary by Murmellius and Agricola (1514)’, in: Between Demonstration and Imagination: Essays in the History of Science and Philosophy Presented to John  D. North, ed.  by Nauta and others (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp.  311–38 (pp.  313–17); and Goris and Wissink, ‘The Medieval Dutch Tradition’, p. 164. 112 Hoenen, ‘The Transition of Academic knowledge’, pp. 164–65; Thom Mertens, ‘Consolation in Late Medieval Dutch Literature’, in Boethius in the Middle Ages, pp. 107–20; and J. M. Willeumier-Schalij, ‘Middelnederlandse mystiek rond 1500. Troost in gelatenheid’, Ons Geestelijk Erf, 64 (1990), 227–53. 113 Steven Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent. Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 8–13. 114 Maurice de Gandillac, Valeur du temps dans la pédagogie spirituelle de Jean Tauler (Montreal: Insitut d’Études Médiévales and Paris: J. Vrin, 1956). 115 Niklaus Largier, ‘Time and Temporality in the “German Dominican School”: Outlines of a Philosophical Debate Between Nicolaus of Strasbourg, Dietrich of Freiberg, Eckhart of Hoheim, and Ionnes Tauler’, in The Medieval Concept of Time: Studies on the Scholastic Debate and its Reception in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. by Pasquale Porro (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 241–51.

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Conclusion The carved altarpieces of the early sixteenth century were one of the mainstays of the art industry in the Low Countries and served numerous functions. Certainly they were stunning demonstration of craft — of the extraordinary skills of Netherlandish sculptors, joiners, and polychromers — and audiences greatly appreciated their unusual material qualities. But these retables also conveyed abstract notions of time and of sacred history and its design. Viewers came from markedly varied backgrounds and would have subscribed to the readings presented here to differing degrees. The church officials who commissioned or purchased these artefacts were likely highly cognizant of theories and controversies related to time and eternity and of the Platonic view of geometry as a divine instrument for shaping and comprehending creation. The artists — especially the designers — would probably have recognized these concerns, but their immediate attention was understandably focussed on narrow technical problems involved in satisfying their contracts. The congregation of the devout was more diverse, yet many must have appreciated the most basic elements of these issues, which were widely circulating at the time. Viewers, however, need not have registered such matters on a fully conscious level. The peculiar structure of Netherlandish carved altarpieces suggested a simulacrum of God’s vision of time as envisioned by Boethius, Augustine, Aquinas, and many others. These works revealed the meaning and purpose that are inseparable from time, even as they are hidden from its actors and agents. This function helps explain the complex spatial plan of so many of the retables, their segmentation into numerous discrete compartments just at a moment when painted altarpieces were representing disparate elements within a single continuous realm. It also helps account for the survival of the abundant Gothic ornament when painters were rapidly adopting the fashionable antique manner. The elaborate Gothic tracery that encrusts these retables might suggest the celestial ordination of the events contained within — the material architecture of history and the craft of its construction.

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Making a Room of One’s Own Place, Space, and Literary Performance in Sixteenth-Century Bruges Samuel Mareel Ghent University/ Museum Hof van Busleyden

Introduction The Netherlandish chambers of rhetoric (rederijkerskamers) are one of the rare phenomena in the history of literature to be designated with a compound term that relates the writing and presentation of literary texts (proffered as a manifestation of the classical art of rhetoric) with a spatial phenomenon (a chamber).1 This terminological link between a literary practice on the one hand and place/space on the other is further reinforced by the importance for the chambers of another spatial phenomenon, namely the city.2 Every chamber was linked to a specific city, by which it was officially recognized and from which it frequently received financial aid. During large competitions, when chambers defended the honour of their town, the name of the city was often added to that of the chamber or even replaced it outright.3 The importance of space suggested by the terminology surrounding the chambers of rhetoric has known but limited and partial reflection in scholarship on this literary phenomenon. Scholarly focus has been almost exclusively on spatial aspects of rhetorician drama and, more specifically, on the stages upon which and — from the seventeenth century onwards — on the theatre halls within which these dramatic performances took

The term ‘chamber of rhetoric’ could refer both to the space where a group of rhetoricians gathered and to the association itself, cf. ‘rederijkerskamer’ in the Woordenboek der Nederlandse taal: http://gtb.inl.nl/iWDB/search?actie=art icle&wdb=WNT&id=M057943 [accessed 26 August 2013]. 2 The terms ‘space’ and ‘place’ have been redefined and problematized in so many ways in the extensive literature on these phenomena that they seem to require an accompanying definition whenever they are used. In this essay, therefore, I  use these terms primarily to distinguish between the two- and the three-dimensional. When I talk about ‘place’ I refer to geographical location — a spot that can be occupied on a map in relation to other locations; by ‘space’ I mean something that (in its physical manifestation) has a length, a width, and a height and that can contain objects and/ or bodies. 3 See, for example, the edition of the plays that were presented at the famous theatre competition in Ghent in 1539: De Gentse spelen van 1539, ed. by B. H. Erné and L. M. van Dis, 2 vols (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982). 1

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 65-80. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114001

Samuel Mareel

place.4 Far less attention has been paid to the place of these stages within the larger (urban) spatial context that surrounded them. We also know little about the spatial environments in which the lyrical compositions of rhetoricians were performed; the same goes for spaces in which rhetoricians held the periodic meetings that defined them, making them not only  simple performance groups but also centres of sociability, learning, formation, and religious practice.5 The relationship between the chambers and the cities in which they were based has received considerable attention from social and cultural historians, who have thoroughly analysed the representation of social groups and their ideologies within the chambers as well as the ways in which they received important political, social, and religious events and phenomena.6 However, in doing so, these scholars have approached the city primarily as a social phenomenon — as a community of people and their ideas and opinions — rather than as a spatial one.7 Space and place might at first seem of limited importance for the study of the performance activities of groups that, until the arrival of purpose-built theatres, were extremely mobile and flexible. Contemporary documents referring to the chambers’ performance activities mention all sorts of places: squares, streets, houses, churches, churchyards, to name just a few. Rhetoricians also regularly travelled to other cities to perform drama, poetry, and song in a variety of venues. Almost any location, it seems, could become the site of a performance. This can give the impression that space and place simply did not matter to these kinds of mobile performance groups — who also, it should be noted, existed elsewhere in early modern Europe. In The Illusion of Power (1975), American Renaissance scholar Stephen Orgel called the 1576 construction of The Theatre, just outside London, the moment when the concept of theatre ‘became located and embodied in architecture’. ‘Before the opening of this permanent theater building, one of the first in Europe since Roman times’, Orgel writes: the concept of theater had included no sense of place. A theater was not a building, it was a group of actors and an audience; the theater was any place in which they chose to perform. When the play was over, the hall or courtyard or banqueting room ceased to be a theater.8 W. M. H. Hummelen, ‘Types and Methods of the Dutch Rhetoricians’ Theatre’, in The Third Globe: Symposium for the Reconstruction of the Globe Playhouse, Wayne State University, 1979, ed. by C. Walter Hodges, S. Schoenbaum, and Leonard Leone (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981), pp. 164–89, 233–35, 252–53; Bart Ramakers, ‘De stad als decor. De representatie van de stad in het middeleeuwse toneel’, Feit en fictie, 2 (1995), 94–109; and Timothy De Paepe, ‘How New Technologies Can Contribute to our Understanding of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Drama: An Antwerp Case Study’, Journal of Dutch Literature, 1:1 (2010), 29–54. On the stage-oriented research on spatial aspects of early modern English drama, see Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 1–2. 5 On the chambers of rhetoric as centres of sociability, learning, formation, and religious practice, see especially the work of Arjan van Dixhoorn, such as his Lustige geesten. Rederijkers in de Noordelijke Nederlanden (1480–1650) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009). 6 See first, of course, Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Om beters wille. Rederijkerskamers en de stedelijke cultuur in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (1400–1650) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008); Gary Waite, Reformers on Stage: Popular Drama and Religious Propaganda in the Low Countries of Charles V, 1515–1556 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); and Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, ‘Let Each Man Carry on With his Trade and Remain Silent’: Middle-Class Ideology in the Urban Literature of the Late Medieval Low Countries’, Cultural & Social History, 10:2 (2013), 169–89. 7 A spatial perspective is present, however, in certain studies on political ritual in the Low Countries, which pay some attention to the chambers of rhetoric. See, for instance, Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, La Ville des cérémonies: Essai sur la communication politique dans les anciens Pays-Bas bourguignons (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004); and Peter Arnade, Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 8 Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 2.

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The place of a performance, Orgel’s quote suggests, was something essentially neutral that added very little to the theatrical event. What mattered instead were the actors and the audience. In this view, the only advantages or impediments of space and place for a performance were of a material nature, including whether it could hold the necessary number of people, was easily accessible, had favourable acoustics, and provided shelter and good visibility. Space only became interesting when the actors or audience altered it, for example by adding a stage to it. Since Orgel’s book, a renewed fascination for space in the humanities and social sciences has introduced new perspectives.9 Foundational to this ‘spatial turn’ was the 1974 publication of Henri Lefebvre’s La production de l’espace, in which the author tried to develop ‘une théorie unitaire de l’espace’ (‘a unified theory of space’) and sought to develop a methodology for studying space simultaneously as a physical, mental, and social phenomenon.10 A space, according to Lefebvre, is not only defined by its materiality but also by the way people use, perceive, or think about it. Hence his notion of the ‘production’ of space: of space not as straightforward, or as given, but as something that can be created physically, mentally, and/or socially. A  marketplace, for example, is not just the physical sum of its pavement, buildings, and trees; it also consists of the activities that take place there, of ideas about how a marketplace should look and how it should be used, and of individual or collective memories of things that happened there. Applied to early modern performance groups such as the chambers of rhetoric, Lefebvre’s ideas raise a number of fascinating questions regarding the seemingly random places where they performed. What were the motives behind a chamber’s choice to perform in one place or space rather than another? To what extent were these motives not only determined by the physical, but also by the social and mental nature of the place or space in question? In what way and to what extent did literary performances determine or alter the physical, mental, and social aspects of a place or space? And, vice versa, in what way and to what extent did the physical, mental, and social characteristics of a place or space shape a performance? In this essay, I  want to ask some of the above questions in relation to the texts and activities of the chambers of rhetoric in one specific city within a relatively limited timeframe: Bruges around the middle of the sixteenth century. Sixteenth-century Bruges makes for an interesting case study because of its (in recent scholarship, strongly undervalued) importance within Netherlandish culture and, in particular, because of a number of fascinating sources that have come down to us concerning rhetorician culture in the city during this period. Bruges had two chambers around the middle of the sixteenth century, and these were among the oldest in the Low Countries: De Heilige Geest (‘The Holy Ghost’,

See, among others, Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Medieval Practices of Space, ed. by Barbara Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Fertile Spaces: The Productivity of Urban Space in Northern Europe, ed.  by Arnade, Martha  C. Howell, and Walter Simons, Special Issue of Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32:4  (2002); David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003); Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, ed. by Albrecht Classen (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009); and The Power of Space in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The cities of Italy, Northern France and the Low Countries, ed. by Marc Boone and Howell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). 10 Henri Lefebvre, La Production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos, 2000), p. 29. 9

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founded in 1428) and De Drie Santinnen (‘The Three Female Saints’, founded c. 1474).11 Many of the literary texts that were written in and around these two associations have been lost or remain unidentified; thus hardly any writings by what appear to have been famous Bruges authors such as Stevin vanden Gheenste or Jan de Scheerere are extant. Much of this loss is compensated, however, by two extensive manuscript collections, both of them autographs, with literary works by two Bruges rhetoricians: one volume of thirty-five theatre pieces by Cornelis Everaert, completed between 1538 and 1556; and another of more than 300 lyrical texts in a wide variety of genres compiled by Eduard de Dene in 1561–62.12 What makes the Everaert and De Dene autographs so valuable is not only their size and variety in terms of themes and genres but also the numerous references they contain — both in the texts themselves and in the paratexts — to the cultural, social, and spatial context in which they were written and distributed. Supplemented by a relatively large and varied body of archival material, such as city accounts, chronicles, legal documents, and agreements between members of the chambers — as well as unique documents like the beautiful bird’s-eye view of Bruges etched by Marcus Gerards the Elder in 1562 — these texts provide us with interesting insight into the spatial aspects of the Bruges rhetoricians’ activities. In broader perspective, they can also give us a better understanding of the role of literature in the production of space in the early modern city and on the often fuzzy border between urban space and literary space. Private Activities of the Chambers Over the last two decades, scholarship on the chambers of rhetoric has focused primarily on large public performances, especially during important religious festivals and parades (like the Bruges Procession of the Holy Blood or the Brussels ommegang); rhetorician festivals (like the one in Ghent in 1539 or the 1561 Antwerp landjuweel); or joyous entries and celebrations of military victories and peace treaties.13 Rederijker performances during these events could be either ambulant (for example during a procession or joyous entry) or stationary. In the second case, they generally took place at the same central location in the city, like the Grand Place in Brussels or Antwerp, the Hoogpoort in Ghent, or, in the case of Bruges, De Burg Square.

On the two Bruges chambers of rhetoric during the sixteenth century, see, among others, J. W. Muller and L. Scharpé, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1920), pp. v–xxii; A. Schouteet, ‘Inventaris van het archief van de Brugse rederijkersgilden van de H. Geest, van de Drie Santinnen en van het H. Kruis op het stadsarchief van Brugge’, Handelingen van het Genootschap voor Geschiedenis te Brugge, 114  (1977), 361–85; and Dirk Geirnaert, ‘De kamers van rhetorica te Brugge. Een blik op 400 jaar Brugse rederijkersactiviteit’, Biekorf Brugge, 95 (1995), 234–50. 12 Brussels: Royal Library, MS 19036; and De spelen van Cornelis Everaert, ed. by W. N. M. Hüsken, 2 vols (Hilversum: Verloren, 2005). Ghent: University Library, MS 3330; and Eduard de Dene, Testament rhetoricael, ed. by Werner Waterschoot and Dirk Coigneau, 3 vols (Ghent: Jaarboek De Fonteine, 1976–80). Both De Dene’s autograph and the edition can be consulted online; for the manuscript, see http://adore.ugent.be/OpenURL/app?id=archive.ugent.be:36EE9D9C-7D4F11E1-9615-3DB03B7C8C91&type=carousel [accessed 7 August 2014]; for the edition, see http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/ dene001test01_01 [accessed 7 August 2014]. 13 Ramakers, Spelen en figuren: toneelkunst en processiecultuur in Oudenaarde tussen Middeleeuwen en Moderne Tijd (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996); Samuel Mareel, Voor vorst en stad: rederijkersliteratuur en vorstenfeest in Vlaanderen en Brabant 1432–1561 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010); Ruud Ryckaert, De Antwerpse spelen van 1561: naar de editie Silvius (Antwerpen 1562) uitgegeven met inleiding, annotaties en registers, 2 vols (Ghent: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 2011); and Jeroen Vandommele, Als in een spiegel: vrede, kennis en gemeenschap op het Antwerpse landjuweel van 1561 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2011). 11

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Scholarly attention to elaborate festivals has understandably been motivated by the cultural and political significance of these events and also, more practically, by the considerable number of extant relevant sources, which include city accounts, chronicles, and editions of plays, poems, and songs presented during the festivities. It is important to realize, however, that these kinds of festivals were rare events. In the Bruges Municipal Ordinances from 1493 to 1538 Wim Hüsken found references to eleven political celebrations in the city during which plays had been performed: about one every four years.14 We must therefore be careful not to base our perception of the rhetoricians’ activities as a whole too strongly on these festivals or, with the purpose of the present essay in mind, on the sites where they occurred. The place where the rhetoricians of both De Heilige Geest and De Drie Santinnen gathered most frequently around the middle of the sixteenth century was the Bruges Carmelite convent.15 The building was destroyed during the Calvinist regime in Bruges (1578–84), after which De Heilige Geest moved most of its private activities to the Poortersloge (Porters’ Lodge).16 It was at the Carmelites that the majority of the (semi-) private literary activities (those directed at the membership of the chamber itself or at members of other local chambers) took place. The use of ecclesiastical buildings, especially mendicant convents, for secular activities was not uncommon in late medieval and early modern Europe.17 For a long time, they were the only large public stone buildings available in towns; later on, they continued being used by different groups — including urban and territorial governments, tribunals, guilds, and confraternities — for a variety of practical and symbolic uses, from the holding of meetings to the housing of guests. One of the most informative sources concerning the presence of the Bruges rhetoricians at the Carmelites (and elsewhere in the city) comes from a document that specifies the terms of a 1494 agreement between De Heilige Geest and De Drie Santinnen. This document was to put an end to a long period of conflict between the two chambers over issues of priority and collaboration; it describes, among other things, the use of the Carmelite convent.18 The document mentions that De Heilige Geest and De Drie Santinnen used the great refectory of the Carmelites to ‘scole houden’ (‘hold school’, i.e. to practice the composition and presentation of literary texts) and to ‘prysen uphanghen, vraghen uutgheven van loven ende anders’ (‘put up prizes, put out questions for praises and other [genres]’, i.e. organize small competitions, most of them probably for poetry and song). In the same hall, De Heilige Geest also celebrated its yearly koningsfeest (‘king’s festival’) banquet.19 On Hüsken, ‘Politics and Drama: The City of Bruges as Organizer of Drama Festivals’, in The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Alan E. Knight (Cambridge: Brewer, 1997), pp. 165–87 (pp. 181–85). 15 On the activities of De Heilige Geest and De Drie Santinnen at the Carmelite convent, see Muller and Scharpé, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, pp. v–xix; and Reinhard Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 68–70. 16 Marc Ryckaert, Brugge. Historische stedenatlas van België (Brussels: Gemeentekrediet, 1991), p.  196; and Hüsken, ‘Kroniek van het toneel in Brugge (1468–1556)’, Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 1 (1992), 219–52 (p. 221). 17 On the use of mendicant convents and other religious buildings for (semi-)secular activities, see The Use and Abuse of Sacred Places in Late Medieval Towns, ed. by Paul Trio and Marjan De Smet (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006); cf. Simons, Stad en apostolaat. De vestiging van de bedelorden in het graafschap Vlaanderen (c.  1225–c.  1350) (Brussel: Koninklijke academie voor wetenschappen, letteren en schone kunsten van België, 1987); and Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, pp. 60–73. 18 Bruges City Archives, Nr. 390/2 (Inv.Nr.B2). For a paraphrase of the document, see Muller and Scharpé, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, pp. viii–xi; and cf. Van Bruaene, Om beters wille, pp. 71–73. 19 The members of De Heilige Geest also used the Carmelite monastery for non-literary activities. In the monastery chapter, for instance, they chose a new chaplain every year on the Sunday before Pentecost (Muller and Scharpé, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, p. xi). 14

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the first Sunday following Epiphany, a mock king of the chamber was elected who was given several duties, including the organization of a banquet shortly before Shrove Tuesday. It is probably to the occasion of De Heilige Geest’s koningsfeest that De Dene refers when, in his Testament, he mentions that he has sometimes ghebrast (‘binged’) in the refectory of the Carmelite brothers.20 The koningsfeest was traditionally accompanied by a tafelspel (‘table play’), a ­dramatic genre quite common among the rhetoricians that was performed during or after a meal.21 These short plays were generally constructed around the presentation of an ­allegorical gift to one of the diners — in this case the king of the chamber. In his autograph manuscript, Cornelis Everaert included two table plays that he wrote for a De Heilige Geest koningsfeest: Esbatement van Scaemel Ghemeente ende van Trybulacie (‘The Comical Play of the Poor People and of Adversity’) and Tspil van den Berch (‘The Play of the Mountain’).22 Another important space for the chambers of rhetoric was the chapel in which they had an altar. This was primarily used for commemorative services in which the chambers, which also functioned as devotional confraternities, were involved. De Heilige Geest’s Chapel of the Holy Ghost was located in the monastery church of the Carmelites and held an altar dedicated to the Trinity.23 Founded in 1426 by Agnès de Mortaigne, widow of the high noble Jean de Gruuthuse, the chapel was also where she was buried. It was apparently on her personal request that the space had been donated to De Heilige Geest by her grandson Lodewijk van Gruuthuse in 1466. Like most chambers in Flanders and Brabant, De Drie Santinnen had an altar not in a monastery but in a parish church: the Chapel of Saint Anne at the Church of Our Lady.24 In the eighteenth century the De Drie Santinnen altar was moved to a redecorated chapel in the northern side aisle of the church, where it can still be seen today.25 Once a year, on Maundy Thursday, De Heilige Geest left the Carmelite convent to gather at the house of the current chamber chaplain. This tradition still existed at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Jan Pieter van Male was a member of De Heilige Geest and discussed its history in a number of historiographical writings. According to Van Male, the members of the chamber came together three days before Easter to share a modest meal and ‘te hooren lezen de Wercken dewelcke ofte eenige van hun gezelschap, ofte andere gemeyne Gilde-broeders hadden gedicht op het een ofte ander deel van het Lijden van onzen Zaligmaecker’ (‘to hear the recitation of the works which either one of their company or one of the common brethren of the chamber had composed in verse on

De Dene, Testament rhetoricael, i, p.  74: ‘De onser vrauwen broeders | diemen caermers heet || Ick hebber zomtyds ghebrast inde Reiftere’. 21 On the genre of the tafelspel, see P. Pikhaus, Het tafelspel bij de rederijkers, 2 vols (Ghent: Koninklijke academie voor Nederlandse taal- en letterkunde, 1988–89). 22 Hüsken, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, pp. 300–20, 911–24. The title of Tspil van den Berch is likely a pun on the name of the new king of the chamber, Jacob Van den Berghe (Hüsken, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, pp. 912–13). 23 On the chapel of De Heilige Geest at the Carmelites, see Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, pp. 69–70; and Johan Oosterman, ‘Tussen twee wateren zwem ik. Anthonis de Roovere tussen rederijkers en rhétoriqueurs’, Jaarboek De Fonteine, 49–50 (1999–2000), 11–29 (pp. 23–24). 24 A bound collection of documents called Cartularium Drie Santinnen and related primarily to the devotional activities of De Drie Santinnen is extant at the Bruges City Archives, Oud Archief, Nr. 390: Drie Santinnen, Inv.Nr.1. 25 Jean de Vincennes, Churches of Bruges (Bruges: Gidsenbond, 1960), p. 59. 20

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some part of the Passion of our Saviour’).26 In his Testament, De Dene included a series of refreinen (‘refreins’, a poetic form commonly composed by rhetoricians) on the Last Supper, which he — as he himself indicates — recited over a period of more than twenty years at a number of Maundy Thursday De Heilige Geest gatherings.27 Sources relating to the spaces used by the Bruges chambers of rhetoric for their private activities around the middle of the sixteenth century thus clearly indicate that, in contrast with their counterparts in many other towns, they did not own a designated ‘chamber’ in which to meet, nor did they have one at their disposal on a permanent basis. Unlike the wealthy trade guilds and shooting confraternities, the rhetoricians probably did not have the financial means to buy property and so most of the spaces they used were shared. Other Bruges confraternities, such as those of the Immaculate Conception and of Our Lady of Roosebeke, were also based at the Carmelites. During the fifteenth century, several of the foreign merchant communities (the most notable of which was the English Fellowship of the Merchant Adventurers, of which the famous printer William Caxton was a member) held their meetings and festivities there.28 The same was true of the chambers’ chapels. While De Heilige Geest seems to have had the exclusive use of the Chapel of the Holy Ghost at the Carmelites from 1466, the year of its donation, the Chapel of Saint Anne at Our Lady, where De Drie Santinnen had its altar, actually belonged to the tanners’ guild. The absence of a permanent space at the disposal of the chambers is also suggested by a document from 1568 stipulating the duties attached to the office of the De Heilige Geest clerk. This person was required to keep the chamber’s belongings, including tapestries, banners, chandeliers, and paintings, in his possession; at the end of his office he had to render these objects to the dean or to one of the supervisors.29 The fact that the Bruges chambers shared space with other associations rather than owning it does not mean, however, that they had no ‘sense of space’, or that their relationship to the spaces they used was a purely practical one. As the use of the chaplain’s house for the yearly Maundy Thursday gathering suggests, spaces could have symbolic value. The choice of the chaplain’s house seems to have been motivated by the fact that the first of these meetings (c. 1428), during which the chamber had been founded, had also taken place at the house of a chamber chaplain.30 More significant than the symbolic value that spaces had for the Bruges rhetoricians, however, is the way in which they ‘produced’ space (to use Lefebvre’s concept) by redefining its function and meaning. The chambers show an outspoken tendency to symbolically appropriate spaces: to make them their own for the time they performed or gathered there.31 This could be done by means of the literary performance itself; thus Cornelis Everaert made the place and time of the action in his aforementioned table plays Joannes Petrus Van Male, Ontleding ende verdeding vande edele ende reden-rijcke konste der Poëzye […] (Brugge: Jan Baptist Verhulst, 1724), p. 26. 27 De Dene, Testament Rhetoricael, ii, pp. 24–40. 28 Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, pp. 63–70; and Oosterman, ‘Tussen twee wateren zwem ik’, pp. 23–24. 29 Muller and Scharpé, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, pp. xvi–xvii. Cf. the situation of the Ghent chamber Mariën Theeren, which was studied by Van Bruaene in Om beters wille, pp. 150–56. 30 On this foundational meeting, see Laurence Derycke and Van Bruaene, ‘Sociale en literaire dynamiek in het vroeg vijftiende-eeuwse Brugge: de oprichting van de rederijkerskamer De Heilige Geest c.  1428’, in Stad van koopmanschap en vrede. Literatuur in Brugge tussen Middeleeuwen en Rederijkerstijd, ed. by Oosterman (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), pp. 59–96. 31 On the appropriation of space, see Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, i: Arts de faire (Paris: Union générale d’éditions 10–18, 1980), esp. p. 14; and Koen Goudriaan, ‘Conclusion’, in The Use and Abuse of Sacred Places, pp. 218–20. 26

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for the De Heilige Geest koningsfeest identical to those in which the play’s spectators found themselves. In Tspil van den Berch, for example, the three characters of the play, Lustich van Herten (‘Joyous Heart’), Boerdelic Zin (‘Playful Mind’), and Duechdelic Voortstel (‘Virtuous Intention’) enter the hall where the banquet is taking place and directly address the new king. Both the play’s spectators and the space in which they find themselves are thus integrated into and appropriated by the allegorical and fictional world of the table play.32 The refectory of the Carmelites was transformed from the space of performance to a space in the performance. Another method used by the rhetoricians to appropriate spaces was by adorning them with objects symbolizing the chamber. The object most commonly used for this purpose was a blazon. Michael Camille has called the act of attaching a blazon to an architectural construction ‘articulating a space of selfhood’;33 the practice and its symbolic value seem to have been common across early modern Europe. Antonio Castillo Gómez, for example, has analysed the semiotics of the numerous arms of kings, princes, and ecclesiastical authorities attached to buildings and monuments that belonged to them or that had been built under their patronage.34 What is noteworthy about the rhetoricians’ use of emblems in this way, however, is that, as in the tafelspelen mentioned above, it symbolizes the temporary appropriation and transformation rather than the possession of a particular space. Its significance, in other words, was ritual rather than legal; thus the 1568 document regarding the duties of De Heilige Geest clerk talks about the moments ‘als het wapen vande gilde ten Carmers wordt opgehangen’ (‘when the arms of the guild are put up at the Carmelites’).35 Visual depictions of scenes involving rhetoricians also often show blazons attached to architectural constructions such as a stage (see Pieter Balten’s A Performance of the Farce ‘Een cluyte van Plaeyerwater’ at a Flemish Village kermesse, c. 1540–c. 1598, at the Dutch Theatre Institute) or a façade (see Jan Steen’s The Rhetoricians, c. 1655, at the Worcester Art Museum). Other objects were also symbolically used to link a space to a chamber of rhetoric. Most of De Heilige Geest’s possessions placed in the care of its clerk were used to adorn the chamber’s chapel. Above the altar of De Drie Santinnen hung a painting by the Master of the Saint Lucy Legend depicting the Virgin surrounded by female saints (now in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels).36 In the chamber’s next chapel (at Our Lady), this was replaced by a painting (still there today) by Jan Garemyn of Magdalene, Barbara, and Catherine (1764), the three patron saints of the chamber.37

Cf. Pikhaus, Tafelspel, pp. 126–58. Michael Camille, ‘Signs of the City: Place, Power, and Public Fantasy in Medieval Paris’, in Medieval Practices of Space, pp. 1–36 (p. 13). 34 A. Castillo Gómez, ‘Entre public et privé. Stratégies de l’écrit dans l’Espagne du Siècle d’Or’, Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 56 (2001), 803–29 (p. 805). 35 Muller and Scharpé, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, p. xvii. 36 De Vincennes, Churches of Bruges, p. 59. 37 Jan Tilleman, De Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk Brugge (Regensburg: Verlag Schnell & Steiner, 2011), p. 20. 32 33

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Fig. 1: Jan Steen, The Rhetoricians, c. 1655, oil on panel, Worcester Art Museum. On the facade hangs the blazon of the Amsterdam chamber of rhetoric De Eglantier (The Eglantine Rose) with its motto In liefde bloeyende (flourishing in love).
© Bridgeman Art Library – Paris.

Elaborate poems in forms typical of the rhetoricians, such as the refrein, also linked the spaces where they were posted to the rhetoricians. In his Testament, De Dene bequeaths appropriate poems to the chapels of both De Heilige Geest at the Carmelites and De Drie Santinnen at Our Lady: separate refrains on the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost as well as another on the Trinity (for the Chapel of the Holy Ghost); and refrains on Mary Magdalene and on the holy Catherine, Magdalene, and Barbara (for the chapel of De Drie

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Santinnen).38 The author does not state what was to be done with these exact texts, but in his introductions to comparable texts, he explicitly mentions that they were to be posted in the chapel in question. Public Activities Public performances of the Bruges chambers — not only aimed at rhetoricians but at the general population — took place either outdoors, in urban public spaces, or indoors, at a public inn. Open air performances were generally for theatre and song, while poetry was more often performed at an inn. In both cases, there was usually some form of competition involved. As Marc Boone has argued, Flemish cities ‘had developed a highly articulated political space, marked by the presence of such symbolic buildings as city halls and belfries in and around which political statements could be made’.39 It is likely that no other performance site of the Bruges rhetoricians resonated so strongly with political overtones as did the Burg Square. This is where celebrations of important political events took place and where most songs and all plays were presented during the large rhetorician competition for song and drama that was organized in Bruges in 1517.40 In the margin of his Tspel van Ghewillich Labuer ende Volc van Neerrynghe (‘The Play of Willing Labour and People of Trade’), Cornelis Everaert mentions that a silver salt tub had been won by the play on the Burg.41 Likewise, next to a Liedeken vanden paeys (‘Song of the Peace Treaty’, probably the 1544 Peace of Crépy) in his Testament, De Dene noted that it had been sung on the Burg during an entry.42 The Burg makes for an interesting case study for the semiotics of public squares as sites for literary performance. As can be seen on Marcus Gerards’s bird’s eye view of Bruges, the Burg was adjacent to another square of about the same size, the Grote Markt.43 However, the Grote Markt never seems to have been used for literary performances. The reason for this preference for the Burg over the Grote Markt might have been partly practical: the Burg had fewer access roads than the Grote Markt, and could thus be closed off more easily, allowing for more control over who entered and left the square.44 More important, however, would have been the symbolic significance of each place. With the belfry and the ‘Waterhalle’, the Grote Markt represented the economic power of Bruges and of the different guilds that assured its prosperity. The Burg, on the other hand, was the site of the Bruges city hall, the home and symbol of the political and juridical power of the city aldermen. It was often they who organized and subsidized public literary performances, a state of affairs that would have been emphasized by permitting these kinds of events to take place De Dene, Testament, i, pp. 74–85, 103–07. Boone, ‘Urban Space and Political Conflict in Late Medieval Flanders’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32:4 (2002), 621–40 (p. 630). 40 Hüsken, ‘Kroniek van het toneel in Brugge’; and Maurits Vandecasteele, ‘Een rederijkersfeest te Brugge in 1517’, De Fonteine, 17 (1967), 27–46. 41 Hiermede was ghewonnen up den burch een selveren zoutvat, in Hüsken, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, p. 390. 42 De Dene, Testament Rhetoricael, iii, pp. 25–27. 43 Excellent digitized versions of the Gerards map and of other historical maps of Bruges can be consulted through the website Huizenonderzoek Brugge: http://www.kaartenhuisbrugge.be [accessed 20 October 2016]. 44 At the 1517 festival, for example, access to the Burg was restricted during the passage of the entry parade on the square (Vandecasteele, ‘Een rederijkersfeest te Brugge’, pp. 36–37, 45). 38 39

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in front of the most vivid material symbol of the aldermen’s wealth and power.45 Plays also seem to have been presented in the direction of the city hall façade, from inside of which the aldermen could follow the performances.46 The symbolic significance of the Bruges rhetoricians’ other public performance sites is less straightforward than the case of the Burg. The chambers appear to have had a lot of freedom in deciding where to play. This, at least, is what the vague formulation in the 1494 agreement suggests in permitting De Drie Santinnen to perform ‘te alzulker plaetse alst hemlieden ghelieuen zal’ (‘wherever they please’), referring to the custom of performing plays on carts ‘van strate te strate’ (‘throughout the city’).47 We do get a glimpse of a meaningful relationship between performance and place on occasion, however, especially in the case of poetic contests at inns. In 1478, for example, when Philip the Fair was born in Bruges, the local tailors’ guild organized a competition for laudatory poems on the young prince in De Witte Ram (‘The White Ram’).48 This inn was situated in front of the Prinsenhof (‘The Court of the Prince’); the choice of this location seems to have been less to perform before the princes themselves as to mark the specific place in the city where a memorable event was taking place. Like the tailors’ guild, the two Bruges chambers also made use of inns to hold competitions for poetry — often refreinen. A  number of invitations for these events are extant, and they suggest that each of the chambers held its poetic contests in a particular establishment: for De Heilige Geest, Inde cleen bargie (‘In the Small Barge’); for De Drie Santinnen, In den Blenden Ezele (‘In the Blind Donkey’).49 As indicated above, both chambers also gathered in the refectory of the Carmelites for poetic competitions, while De Heilige Geest sometimes used the Porter’s Lodge in addition.50 None of the extant invitations contain explicit motivations for the choice of a particular venue. When comparing these documents, however, a significant difference between competitions at the Carmelites or the Porter’s Lodge (on the one hand) and at inns (on the other) seems to lie in the fact that the second were aimed at a wider audience. Three extant solicitations for competitions organized by De Heilige Geest at the Porter’s Lodge in 1571, 1572, and 1573 are explicitly aimed at male rhetoricians: broeders (‘brethren’), ghilde-broeders (‘guild brethren’), and heilig Gheest ghilde-broeders (‘guild brethren of the Holy Ghost’).51 Extant invitations from competitions held In den Blenden Ezele by De Drie Santinnen (1570 and 1573) and Inde cleen bargie by De Heilige Geest (1533 and 1534) use significantly broader terms to address potential participants or do not specify them at all.52

Hüsken, ‘Kroniek van het toneel in Brugge’. See, for instance, the item from the 1442 Bruges city accounts (quoted in Derycke and Van Bruaene, ‘Sociabiliteit en literaire dynamiek’, p. 66) or the address to the eerweerdeghe heeren (’noble lords’) in some of Everaerts political plays (Tspel van den Hooghen Wynt ende Zoeten Reyn and Tspel van Ghewillich Labuer ende Volc van Neerrynghe, in Hüsken, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, pp. 248–49 and 412, respectively). 47 Muller and Scharpé, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, pp. viii, ix. 48 Mareel, Voor vorst en stad, p. 117. 49 Ghent City Archives, 200/3; J.  F. Willems, ‘Oude pryskaerten van de Brugsche rederykkamer De Drie Santinnen’, Belgisch museum voor de Nederduitsche taal- en letterkunde en de geschiedenis des vaderlands, 9  (1845); Willems, ‘De rederykkamer van den Heiligen Geest, te Brugge’, Belgisch museum voor de Nederduitsche taal- en letterkunde en de geschiedenis des vaderlands, 10 (1846); and Muller and Scharpé, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, pp. xiii–xv. 50 Willems, ‘De rederykkamer van den Heiligen Geest’, pp. 242, 244, 245. 51 Willems, ‘De rederykkamer van den Heiligen Geest’, pp. 241, 242, 244. 52 Willems, ‘Oude pryskaerten’; and Muller and Scharpé, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, pp. xiii–xiv. 45 46

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One of the invitations for a poetic contest Inde cleen bargie is remarkable in that it explicitly encourages the attendance of women. Participants were invited to write a poem, probably an amorous refrein, containing the verse ‘reijn vrauwelic gheselscip verciert een feeste’ (‘the presence of a pure woman adorns a feast’). As a contribution to the organization of the festive event, potential contestants were asked ‘brynght wijf en spijse mede thuwen vulleeste’ (‘to bring your wife and food to support you’).53 The invitation does not specify whether that ‘female support’ might have included the presentation of poems by women in attendance. In any case, the association between the performance of rhetorician poetry at an inn and the presence of women is reminiscent of the famous scene in the Mariken van Nieumeghen in which Mariken presents a refrein of her own composition in a tavern in Antwerp.54 It is a tempting hypothesis that the choice to organize a poetry competition at an inn rather than at the Carmelites or the Porter’s Lodge might have been determined by the fact that the latter two spaces were primarily gendered male while the first was more mixed and also open to women.55 (Semi-)Religious Institutions The Bruges rhetoricians not only wrote and performed texts for events organized by themselves or by the urban government; they also provided literary services to other local groups and institutions. For example, the autograph manuscripts of both Everaert and De Dene contain texts composed for the Bruges archers’ Guild of Saint Sebastian. Everaert wrote a Tafelspeilken van der Beke (‘Table Play of the Brook’), probably in 1512, to celebrate the election of this guild’s new king.56 The play was probably performed in the guild’s hall during the banquet that celebrated the appointment of the new king — the archer who had shot a popinjay earlier that day in the guild’s garden.57 De Dene composed a song for the guild’s brethren to be sung at a 1549 shooting competition in Dixmude.58 The Everaert manuscript also contains a Tafelspeilken up een Hoedeken van Marye (‘Table Play on the Rosary of Our Lady’) written in 1530/31 for the king of the hatters’ guild.59 The most frequent patrons of literary performances by Bruges rhetoricians, after the chambers themselves and the aldermen, were not shooting or craft guilds, however, but (semi-)religious institutions. Judging from the Everaert and De Dene manuscripts, convents and other religious communities must have played quite an active role in vernacular literary life in Bruges.60 For example, De Dene regularly worked for the Bruges school of the Bogarden. Bogarden, or Beghard, brothers had been present in the city Muller and Scharpé, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, p. xiv. Mariken van Nieumeghen, ed. by Coigneau (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), pp. 94–97. On the role of women in chambers of rhetoric and, in particular, on the chambers as ‘male space’, see Van Bruaene, ‘Brotherhood and Sisterhood in the Chambers of Rhetoric in the Southern Low Countries’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 36.1 (2005), 11–35 (p. 27). On the concept of ‘gendered space’ in the late medieval Low Countries, cf. Shennan Hutton, ‘Women, Men, and Markets: The Gendering of Market Space in Late Medieval Ghent’, in Urban Space in the Middle Ages, pp. 409–31. 56 Hüsken, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, pp. 731–46. The title of this play is also a pun on the name of the new guild king: Van der Beke. 57 On the communal shoots and meals of fifteenth-century Bruges archery and crossbow guilds, see Laura Crombie, ‘Honour, Community and Hierarchy in the Feasts of the Archery and Crossbow Guilds of Bruges, 1445–81’, Journal of Medieval History, 37 (2011), 102–13 (pp. 106–7). Crombie also mentions a play about Saint George and the dragon that was performed after the guild meal of the crossbowmen of Saint George (p. 106). 58 De Dene, Testament Rhetoricael, I, pp. 228–30. 59 Hüsken, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, pp. 785–802. The title of the play is a pun on rozenhoedje (‘chaplet’). 60 A thorough investigation of these institutions’ extant archives would undoubtedly bring forth a great deal of relevant material regarding the literary activities that took place with their support, at their request, and/or within their walls. 53 54 55

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since the middle of the thirteenth century. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, this semi-monastic male community (a counterpart to the female Beguines) had been seriously depleted and there were reports of disciplinary issues among the few remaining brethren. The Bruges aldermen therefore intervened and transformed the monastery into a school for orphans and for needy and abandoned children.61 In his Testament, De Dene dedicates almost eight folios of text to the school and its children.62 Extant administrative and narrative sources related to the Bogarden, such as a chronicle about life in the school written by one of its administrators, Zeger van Male, further confirm the close ties the institution had with De Dene. The Testament contains two songs in Dutch and one in French on the Holy Blood of Christ to be sung by the Bogarden children while they were marching in the yearly procession of the Holy Blood.63 Each year between 1567 and 1572 (that is, after he had compiled the Testament), De Dene wrote a table play to be performed by the children during a meal that took place after the procession for the aldermen and the school administrators.64 In his Testament, the author refers to seven of his plays that had been staged ‘binder beloke’ (‘inside the walls’) of the school. One of these dramatic compositions was a spel der gheestelicker Loterie. This ‘Play of the Spiritual Lottery’ was almost certainly written for the great lottery organized in 1549 to help finance the restoration of the Bogarden school. For that same occasion, De Dene also composed a commemorative chronogram; the stone in which the verses were engraved can still be seen today above the entrance to the school chapel.65 The mendicant convents in Bruges also regularly witnessed the performance of literary texts, especially plays, inside their walls. De Dene mentions the two sisters he had known in the Augustine convent of the Black Sisters in the Kanstanjeboomstraat, ‘die altemets gheerne een Liedeken claeren end alst pas gheeft Spelen een tafelspeelken’ (‘who, from time to time, liked to sing a song and, if the occasion were right, to perform a table play’).66 Most of the dramatic performances for the mendicant orders would have been in the hands of De Heilige Geest and De Drie Santinnen rhetoricians, however. Both chambers are mentioned in the closing verses of a number of plays for the Franciscans and the Dominicans in the Everaert manuscript. Tspel van eender Jubile (‘The Play of a Jubilee’) was performed in the Franciscan convent to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the entry of one of its friars;67 Tspel van Maria Hoedeken (‘The Play of Mary’s Rosary’) was probably written for the Bruges Confraternity of the Rosary that was based in the Dominicans’ convent church; and Tspel van de Wellecomme van den Predicaren (‘Play of the Welcome of the Dominicans’) was written for a provincial chapter of the same order in 1523.68 On the history of the Beghards in Bruges, see L. Gilliodts-Van Severen, Inventaire diplomatique des archives de l’ancienne école Bogarde à Bruges, 4 vols (Bruges: De Plancke, 1899–1900); and Zeger Van Male, Een beschrijving van de Bogardenschool te Brugge omstreeks 1555, ed. by Albert Schouteet (Brugge: Stadsarchief, 1960). 62 De Dene, Testament Rhetoricael, i, pp. 110–24. 63 De Dene, Testament Rhetoricael, i, pp. 117–19. On the Bruges procession of the Holy Blood, see Andrew Brown, Civic Ceremony and Religion in Medieval Bruges c. 1300–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 64 Hüsken, ‘Kroniek’, pp. 232–33. 65 The text of the chronogram reads ‘Met pennynghen, ghegadert ter loterie | Bij die vander boghaerde vry vpghestelt, | Was dit werck beghonnen, zoot elck anzie. | Leist de roode letteren: tjaer ghij telt’. On this chronogram, see Geirnaert, ‘Restauratie met rekenfout: Eduard de Denes chronogram voor de Bogardenschool’, Biekorf, 111 (2011), 186–91. 66 De Dene, Testament Rhetoricael, i, p. 140. 67 Hüsken, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, pp. 971–87. 68 Hüsken, Spelen van Cornelis Everaert, pp. 73–126, 321–62. 61

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Fig. 2: The entrance to the chapel of the Bogarden school in Bruges with Eduard de Dene’s chronogram above the door. Photo: author.

In his plays for the Franciscans and the Dominicans, Everaert used techniques comparable to those he had employed to integrate the spectators of the play and the space in which they found themselves into the performance of his tafelspelen for the De Heilige Geest koningsfeest at the Carmelites. As is the case in the king’s festival plays, members of the 78

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audience are addressed directly. The prologue of Tspel van de Wellecomme van den Predicaren is directed to the ‘Eerweerdeghe gheleerde, die […] hier zyt versaemt’ (‘Reverend men of learning […] who are gathered here’, v. 7–8); at the end of Tspel van eender Jubile, one of the characters speaks to an ‘Eerweerdich persoon, met al hu vrienden hier int versaemen’ (‘Reverend person, with all you friends gathered here’, v. 233–34). The performance of Tspel van Maria Hoedeken seems to have been aimed at a wider audience, for the prologue to this play tells ‘alle sondaren, die hier versaemt zyt’ (‘all the sinners that are gathered here’, v. 2–3) to be on their guard for pickpockets. Unfortunately, two of these three plays do not provide clues as to where the ‘hier’ in the quotations above was located. Luckily, Tspel van Maria Hoedeken is considerably more informative on this point. At the end of the play, the characters address the audience again: ‘vrienden bemint, wilt verstercken duecht te deser kercken vruecht’ (‘beloved friends, increase [your] virtuousness to the joy of this church’, v. 934–35). As this call is part of a wider appeal to become a member of the Confraternity of the Rosary that was based in the church, it seems likely that ‘this church’ is a deictic reference to the church building in which the performance was taking place. That plays were performed in the Dominican church is confirmed by De Dene’s Testament, which mentions his series of seven plays on the Holy Sacrament that were performed ‘binder voorkercke vanden convente’ (‘in the narthex of the church of the convent’) of the Dominicans.69 In Tspel van Maria Hoedeken, Everaert goes a step further in integrating the space in which the performance was taking place and the space conjured up in the performance itself. Towards the end of this play — which is about the intercessory powers of the Virgin Mary and, especially, the benefits of praying the rosary — a statue of the Virgin is evoked that the characters will subsequently glorify: ‘Wilt ghy Maria ghecryghen te bate, siet hier in state huer beilde, wiltse groeten’ (‘If you want Mary to help you, here you see her statue in all its glory, greet her’, v. 876–78). As the deictic reference ‘siet hier’ suggests, the statue was visible to all — to the characters in the play and to the audience. The performers might have brought a prop along for the performance, but it is more likely that they used a statue of the Virgin that was already present in the church.70 This reference to the statue of Mary is reminiscent of the tableaux vivants in many rhetorician plays.71 Like the disclosure of a tableau, this mention of a statue becomes the dramatic centre — indeed, climax — of the play: the moment at which the meaning of the performance is revealed in a single telling image. Contrary to plays including a tableau, the reference is not to part of a specially constructed stage, however, but to a (pre-existing) architectural feature of the space that contained both performers and audience.

De Dene, Testament Rhetoricael, i, p. 56. It is an alluring hypothesis that this might have been the extant fourteenth-century sculpture of the Virgin that used to be in the Dominican church and that was later transferred to the chapel of the female Dominican convent in Bruges. 71 On the use of tableaux vivants in rhetorician plays, see Hummelen, ‘Het tableau vivant, de “toog”, in de toneelspelen van de rederijkers’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse taal- en letterkunde, 108 (1992), 192–222. 69 70

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Conclusion In the end, what is most striking about place and space in the activities of De Heilige Geest and De Drie Santinnen (and their members) is just how ubiquitous the rhetoricians were in mid-sixteenth century Bruges: from the Burg in front of the Bruges town hall to the convents of the Carmelites, Franciscans, and Dominicans; from the inns of Inde cleen bargie and In den Blenden Ezele to the school of the Beghards; from the streets of the city to the house of the archers’ Guild of Saint Sebastian and the Porter’s Lodge. More significant than the number and diversity of places where they performed, however, is how they interacted with these locales. The two chambers did not own real estate in Bruges, nor did they enjoy their own theatre building or other permanent purpose-built performance space. The halls, squares, and streets where they gathered and presented their plays, poems, and songs were nevertheless very much their own. As their integration of the physical environment of a performance into the performance itself and their adornment of architectural constructions with blazons, poems, and other chamber symbols make clear, space for the rhetoricians was as much something to be produced as something within which to be confined. The many physical ‘chambers’ the chambers of rhetoric employed were thus as much the result of the art of rhetoric itself as of that of architecture.

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Living and Printing in Antwerp in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries A Social Enquiry* Renaud Adam Université de Liège

The art of printing was introduced into the Low Countries in 1473. Within a decade, the technique spread throughout the major cities of the Burgundian possessions: Aalst (1473), Utrecht (1473), Bruges (1473?), Louvain (1473?), Brussels (1475), Delft (1477), Deventer (1477), Gouda (1477), Zwolle (1478), Nijmegen (1479), Oudenaarde (1480), Antwerp (1481), Ghent (1483) and ’s-Hertogenbosch (1484). By the end of the fifteenth century, Antwerp had become the main typographical centre of the Southern Low Countries. The city had two major rivals in the north: Deventer and Zwolle, where the famous school founded by the Brethren of the Common Life encouraged the emergence of an avid reading public. Twenty years later, however, Antwerp surpassed the rest of the Low Countries in the book industry. The rise of Antwerp as the leading typographical centre of the Netherlands can be explained by the strong economic dynamism of the city, where printers found the necessary capital to ensure funding for their businesses.1 Antwerp’s typographical adventure started at the beginning of the 1480s with the printing of Simon van Venlo’s Boexken vander officien ofte dienst der missen, a short devotional handbook on the office of the mass reproduced by the press of Mathias van der Goes

Please note the following abbreviations: NB = Andrew Pettegree and Malcolm Walsby, Netherlandish Books: Books Published in the Low Countries and Dutch Books Printed abroad before 1601, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2011); SA = Stadsarchief (City Archives); and SR  = Schepenregister (Register of Aldermen). The author wishes to thank Dr  Ann Kelders, Royal Library of Belgium, and Dr Susie S. Sutch, University of Ghent, for their careful reading of this article. 1 On the early development of the art of printing and its actors in the Low Countries before the Reformation, see inter alia: Auguste Vincent, ‘La Typographie en Belgique au xve siècle’, in Histoire du livre et de l’imprimerie en Belgique des origines à nos jours, 6 vols (Brussels: Musée du livre, 1924–34), i, pp. 55–90; Le Cinquième centenaire de l’imprimerie dans les Anciens Pays-Bas: exposition à la Bibliothèque royale Albert Ier, du 11 septembre au 27 octobre 1973, exhibition catalogue, ed.  by Georges Colin and Wytze Hellinga (Brussels: Royal Library of Belgium, 1973); Anne Rouzet, Dictionnaire des imprimeurs, libraires et éditeurs belges des xve et xvie siècles dans les limites géographiques de la Belgique actuelle (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1975); Bibliopolis. Geschiedenis van het gedrukte boek in Nederland, ed.  by Marieke van Delft and Clemens de Wolf (The Hague: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 2003), pp. 11–54; Jos M. M. Hermans, Zwolse boeken voor een markt zonder grenzen 1477–1523: met een Catalogus van de verschenen edities en gegevens over bewaard gebleven exemplaren (Utrecht: Hes & De Graaf, 2004); Andrew Pettegree, ‘Printing in the Low Countries in the Early Sixteenth Century’, in The Book Triumphant: Print in Transition in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed.  by Graeme Kemp and Malcolm Walsby (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 3–25; Renaud Adam, ‘Imprimeurs et société dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux et en principauté de Liège (1473–c. 1520)’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Liège, 2011); and Hubert Meeus, ‘Printing in the Shadow of a Metropolis’, in Print Culture and Peripheries in Early Modern Europe: A Contribution to the History of Printing and the Book Trade in Small European and Spanish Cities, ed. by Benito Rial Costas (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 147–70. *

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 83-98. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114002

Renaud Adam

on 8 June 1481.2 By 1520, book production in Antwerp had reached close to 800 titles with a volume of some 11,000 sheets. The most productive typographer of this period was certainly Henrick Eckert van Homberch, who from 1500 to 1520 published more than 150 books consisting of c.  4200 leaves. The other printers of notable importance in the early sixteenth century were Govaert Bac, Michiel Hillen van Hoochstraten, and Willem Vorsterman. Before 1520, Bac and Hillen printed about 130 books and Vorsterman more than 90, all with an average of 8.5 sheets of paper per book.3 It was after 1520, though, that the careers of Hillen and Vorsterman really took off: Hillen came to publish more than 600 books in total and Vorsterman about 400. The books printed in Antwerp before 1520 comprised on average five to ten sheets of paper. Production was dominated by religious subject matter, with a total of more than 380 titles in some 6200 sheets. Secular literature (e.g. poems, chivalric romances, grammar treatises) held second place, with about 300 books in c. 3450 sheets. Law, medicine, philosophy, and science remained a minority, with fewer than ninety books totalling c. 1450 leaves.4 Until now, book historians have concentrated mainly on reconstructing Antwerp book production (using lists of titles printed and census information, for instance) and printers’ individual biographies. Bibliographers have developed very useful research tools, but they have neglected the social aspects of the book trade and have not yet answered the following question: How did the first Antwerp printers integrate themselves into the socio-economic structures of the city? The handpress book industry, after all, is an urban phenomenon that cannot be considered independently of its environment and the people who engaged in it. This essay therefore focuses on three related topics: the origins of the printers and their settlement in the city; printers’ relations with Antwerp’s professional guilds; and familial networks. The Origins of the Printers and Their Settlement in the City The city of Antwerp had a real power of attraction for printers. The number of active printing houses in the city continued to increase until the early 1520s. After a slight decline — which we cannot explain5 — in the following years, this tendency to increase would be reinforced: by the end of the sixteenth century, the city of Antwerp hosted more than twenty-five printing firms within its walls, with more than 450 people active in the typographic trade.

Simon van Venlo, Boexken vander officien ofte dienst der missen (Antwerp: Mathias van der Goes, 1481, in 4°), NB 28000. At this time, printers used four different sizes of paper: Imperial (c. 49 × c. 74 mm), Royal (c. 43 × c. 62 mm), Median (c. 35 × c. 52 mm) and Chancellery (c. 32 × c. 45 mm). On paper size, see Paul Needham, ‘Res papirae: Sizes and Formats of the Late Medieval Book’, in Rationalisierung der Buchherstellung im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit. Ergebnisse eines buchgeschichtlichen Seminars, Wolfenbüttel 12–14 November 1990, ed. by Peter Rück and Martin Boghardt (Marburg an der Lahn: Institut für Historische Hilfswissenschaften, 1994), pp. 123–45. The Royal and Median sizes are relatively rare in the Low Countries, while the Imperial has never been used. See Elly Cockx-Indestege, Jean Gustin, and Gerard van Thienen, ‘Le Missale Leodiense imprimé par Jean de Westphalie (KC I 1262b)’, Bulletin de la Société des Bibliophiles Liégeois, 23 (1997), pp. 19–85 (pp. 33–34); and Bibliopolis, p. 18. 4 Rouzet, Dictionnaire, pp. 2–3, 60–61, 94–96, 239–40; and Adam, ‘Imprimeurs’, i, pp. 137–42, 149–68. 5 The plague could perhaps be an explanation, as some printers may have been afraid to come to Antwerp to open a workshop during times of illness. Cases are documented in Antwerp in 1511, 1513, 1514, 1516, and 1518. See Jean-Noël Biraben, Les Hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens, 2 vols (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), i, p. 417. 2 3

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Number of Printing Workshops in Antwerp (1481–1520)

Various places of origin were represented in these printing firms. The table below shows the different origins of Antwerp typographers before 1520: Name

Origin

Dates of Antwerp Activity

Govaert Bac

Unidentified

1493–1513

Adriaen van Berghen

Unidentified

c. 1500–36

Symon Cock

Antwerp (Brabant)

1519–62

Jan Dingelsche die Lettersnijder

England?

c. 1500–29

Jan van Doesborch

Arnhem? (Holland)

c. 1501/2–31

Roland van den Dorpe

Unidentified

1496–c. 1500

Roland van den Dorpe (widow)

Unidentified

1501–c. 1502

Henrick Eckert von Homberch

Butzbach (Hessen)

1500–21

Jan van Gheet

Antwerp (Brabant)

1509–c. 1517

Mathias van der Goes

Goes (Zealand)

1481–92

Claes de Grave

Unidentified

1512–36

Michiel Hillen van Hoochstraten

Hoogstraten (Brabant)

1506–46

Claes Leeu

Gouda (Holland)

1487–88

Gheraert Leeu

Gouda (Holland)

1484–92

Adriaen van Liesvelt

Brabant?

1494–1500

Jacob van Liesvelt

Unidentified

1513–44

Theodoricus Martinus

Aalst (Flanders)

1493–97 / 1502–126

Thomas van der Noot

Brussels (Brabant)

c. 1501–04

Henrick Pieterszoon die Lettersnider

Rotterdam (Holland)

1492–c. 1500

Willem Vorsterman

Zaltbommel (Brabant)

c. 1500–43

6 The number of printers whose origins remain unknown is high: more than a third of the entire typographical community of Antwerp (32 per cent). Only two typographers

Theodoricus Martinus began his career in Aalst before his stay in Antwerp. He was active in Louvain between 1498 and 1502, and between 1512 and 1529.

6

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are identified as natives of the city: Symon Cock and Jan de Gheet.7 Almost half of the printers who settled in Antwerp came from the Duchy of Brabant (26 per cent) and the County of Holland (21 per cent). Willem Vorsterman was from Zaltbommel, a small town in Northern Brabant;8 his last name was very common in this region.9 Michiel Hillen grew up in the town of Hoogstraten, located about forty kilometres from Antwerp.10 The type-cutter and printer Hendrick Pieterszoon die Lettersnider came from the County of Holland and was born in Rotterdam.11 The Leeu brothers were from Gouda, also in the County of Holland.12 Other printers came from more remote areas. Jan Lettersnijder’s nickname ‘Dingelsche’, for instance, may point to English origins.13 In addition, some printers who had initially worked in another city chose to close their local workshops in order to move to Antwerp. Henrick Eckert did so by leaving the printing establishment he had opened four years before in Delft in 1496. He did not forget his former business; in fact, he baptized his Antwerp workshop Het huys van Delft (The House from Delft). Eckert was not a Dutchman by birth: he was born in Butzbach near Homburg in the German land of Hessen.14 The diversity of the geographical roots of all these typographers points to their mobility and the importance of the connections between Antwerp and its surrounding areas. Unlike miniaturists or bookbinders, printers inserted their addresses in the colophons of the books they published. In the case of Antwerp, this reveals the existence of a neighbourhood dedicated to the printed book: south of the Collegiate Church of Our Lady, in a triangle formed by the Kammenstraat, the Steenhouwersvest, and the Lombaerdeveste, with a focal point in the Kammerpoort (see maps 1 & 2). More than 75  per cent of the printers who worked in the city before 1520 can be found in this area.15 The concentration of these printers not far from the collegiate church can easily be explained by the nearby presence of the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwepand, the nerve centre of Antwerp’s trade in paintings, sculpture, altarpieces, books, and engravings since 1460.16 Symon Cock was the son of Cornelis Cock. He worked in Ghent (1513) before opening his workshop in Antwerp in 1519. See Rouzet, Dictionnaire, pp. 40–41; Adam, ‘Imprimeurs’, ii, p. 378. Jan de Gheet was the son of the lawyer Jannes de Gheet, from Antwerp, and Katline Symoens alias Van Geldenaken. See Rouzet, Dictionnaire, pp.  70–71; and Adam, ‘Imprimeurs’, ii, p. 382. 8 Rouzet, Dictionnaire, pp. 239–40; and Adam, ‘Imprimeurs’, ii, pp. 394–95. 9 Pieter Jacobus Meertens, Nederlands repertorium van Familienamen, 14 vols (Amsterdam: De Walburg Pers, 1963–88), xi, p. 615. 10 Rouzet, Dictionnaire, pp. 94–96; and Adam, ‘Imprimeurs’, ii, pp. 384–85. 11 Rouzet, Dictionnaire, pp. 174–75; and Adam, ‘Imprimeurs’, ii, p. 393. 12 Gheraert Leeu worked in Gouda from 1477 to 1484, when he moved to Antwerp. See Rouzet, Dictionnaire, pp. 120– 23; and Adam, ‘Imprimeurs’, ii, pp. 387–88. His brother Claes helped Gheraert in Antwerp during the years 1487–88 and took care of his financial interests in Gouda. See Rouzet, Dictionnaire, p. 121; and Adam, ‘Imprimeurs’, ii, p. 387. 13 The possibility that the nickname does not refer to the birthplace of the printer should not be ruled out, as ‘Dingelsche’ might simply be related to trade with England. In his study devoted to the foreign staff of the Chapel of the Dukes of Burgundy, David Fiala raises this question with regard to a singer whose name appears in the archival sources first as ‘Thomas Langlois’, then as ‘Thomas France’ (fl. 1472–90). See ‘Les Musiciens étrangers de la cour de Bourgogne à la fin du xve siècle’, Revue du Nord, 84 (2002), 367–87 (p. 375). 14 Rouzet, Dictionnaire, pp. 60–61; and Adam, ‘Imprimeurs’, ii, p. 381. 15 Printers who settled in these streets include Govaert Bac, Adriaen van Berghen, Symon Cock, Jan van Doesborch, Henrick Eckert, Mathias van der Goes, Michiel Hillen, Adriaen van Liesvelt, Theodoricus Martinus, Thomas van der Noot, Henrick Pieterszoon, and Willem Vorsterman. See Adam, ‘Imprimeurs’, ii, pp. 309–10. 16 Wilhelmus Hermanus Vroom, De Onze-Lieve-Vrouwe-kerk te Antwerpen. De financiering van de bouw tot de beeldenstorm (Amsterdam: De Nederlandsche boekhandel, 1983), pp.  78–91; Filip Vermeylen, Painting for the Market: Commercialization of Art in Antwerp’s Golden Age (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 24–27; and Katlijne Van der Stighelen and Filip Vermeylen, ‘The Antwerp Guild of St Luke and the Marketing of Paintings, 1400–1700’, in Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe, 1450–1700, ed. by Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), pp. 189–208. 7

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Fig. 1: Jacques Le Roy, Antverpia constructionis eius primordia et incrementa, [Antwerp: s.n., 1678], 330 × 485 mm, Brussels, KBR, CP, XXXI Anvers - 1678 - LeRoy - III 3006.

Other artisans of the book lived in and around these streets. Unfortunately, the data are too fragmentary to specify the extent of their appropriation of this urban space. We have located at least three binders, two outside of the Kammerpoort, and the third in the Steenhouwersvest. On 13 November 1520, Adriaen van Hoelwyck sold his house, which was situated buiten de Cammerpoort (‘outside the Kammerpoort’), to his colleague Jan Gast.17 In 1509, Master Goswuin lived in the Steenhouwersvest.18 The widow of the bookseller Willem Houtmaert established her residence byde Cammerporte (‘next to the Kammerpoort’). She was the sister of Jan van Driel, bookseller, calligrapher, illuminator, and bookbinder

Antwerp, SA, SR 157 (1520), fols 128v–29r. A book, bound by Adriaen van Hoelwyck in 1528, is privately owned. See Prosper Verheyden, ‘Een band van Adrianus van Hoolwyck’, Tijdschrift voor Boek- en Bibliotheekwezen, 5 (1907), 39–41. Unlike his colleague, Jan Gast joined the Guild of Saint Luke and was admitted as a master in 1503. See Philippe Rombouts and Theodore Van Lerius, Les ‘Liggeren’ et autres archives historiques de la gilde anversoise de saint Luc, 2  vols (Antwerp: Baggerman; The Hague: Nijhoff, 1864–76; repr. 1961), i, p. 63. He hosted the printer Jan Severszoon from Leiden during his stay in Antwerp in 1527. See Rouzet, Dictionnaire, p. 200. 18 This information was discovered in a note written by Gerard van der Scaeft (d. 1536), Abbot of the Premonstratensian Abbey of Averbode, in his copy of Jacobus Faber Stapulensis’s Quincuplex psalterium held now by the University of Liège Library (Th 590). See Jacobus Faber Stapulensis, Quincuplex psalterium. Gallicum. Romanum. Hebraicum. Vetus. Conciliatum (Paris: Henri Estienne, 1509, in–2°), fol. 4r. Master Goswuin, admitted to the Guild of Saint Luke in 1492, worked on some occasions for the Abbey of Averbode and also received 35s. for the binding of a choir book that belonged to the church of Our Lady in Antwerp. See William H. J. Weale, Bookbindings and Rubbings of Bindings in the National Art Library, South Kensington Museum, 2 vols (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1894–98), i, p. lxii; Placide Lefèvre, ‘Transcriptions, enluminures et reliures de manuscrits liturgiques aux xvme et xvime siècles’, Archives, Bibliothèques et Musées de Belgique, 12 (1935), 8–24 (no. 30); and Rombouts and Van Lerius, Les ‘Liggeren’, i, p. 44. 17

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(fl. 1494–1529), who lived not far from the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwepand.19 Several engravers also installed their workshops in this area.20 Yet other businesses, which have no connection with book production, were also represented. In 1503, Govaert Bac’s neighbour was a baker named Ghysbert van Bouwele.21 In sum, Antwerp typographers clustered around other craftsmen, forming a neighbourhood dedicated to the production and sale of printed books at the heart of the city, in the immediate vicinity of the Collegiate Church of Our Lady. Printers and Professional Guilds Too few in number to organize themselves into a guild, printers turned to corporations that other professions of the book had already joined. The first guild of printers in the Low Countries appeared as late as the seventeenth century. It was founded in Brussels in 1662, while in Venice the Council of Ten had imposed the creation of such a guild over a hundred

Antwerp, SA, SR 147 (1515), fol. 93r; Rombouts and Van Lerius, Les ‘Liggeren’, i, p. 59; and Rouzet, Dictionnaire, pp. 59, 98–99. 20 Jan Van der Stock, Printing Images in Antwerp: The Introduction of Printmaking in a City, Fifteenth Century to 1585 (Rotterdam: Sound & Vision Interactive, 1998), pp. 60–71. 21 Antwerp, SA, SR (1502), fol. 118v. 19

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years earlier, in the middle of the sixteenth century (1548–49).22 The ordinance of 1662 established a corporation of printers and booksellers in Brussels, permitting members to enjoy a monopoly on the printing and sale of books in the Southern Netherlands’ capital and prohibiting anyone who was not a member to sell printed books. The recruitment of members was subject to strict formalities: a preliminary admission by the Council of Brabant and a training period of four years with a master residing in Brussels. The corporation was placed under the jurisdiction of the Council of Brabant.23 A major development for the printing trade occurred on 10 June 1570, when Christophe Plantin was appointed the king’s proto-typographer ‘pour avoir superintendance sur le fait de l’imprimerie’ (‘to have superintendency over the act of printing’). His mission consisted in testing all those who wished to exercise any trade whatsoever related to the art of printing. Assisted by one or two master printers, Plantin issued certificates, that were drawn up later by a notary and confirmed either by the king himself or by his lieutenant and governor general. This grant for admission to the profession was the last step in a regulatory process set in motion by the monopoly request made by Claes de Grave in 1512. The function was de facto abolished in 1576 after the fall of Antwerp and would not be renewed after the restoration of Philip II in 1585.24 In Antwerp, the early typographers joined the Guild of Saint Luke. Founded in the late fourteenth century, the corporation hosted different craftsmen (including painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, and glaziers) as well as book artisans (including scribes, illuminators, and bookbinders).25 The guild was directed by two deans, elected for a period of one year. Govaert Bac and Jan Dingelsche served as deans in 1515 and 1532, respectively; Willem Vorsterman occupied the same function in 1527 and 1542.26 According to one of its oldest regulations, no one was authorized to practice a profession under the guild’s supervision unless he possessed or acquired citizenship.27 A foreigner wishing to obtain this status had to pay a fee after swearing allegiance to the duke of Brabant in the presence of the schout Horatio Forbes Brown, The Venetian Printing Press 1469–1800: An Historical Study Based Upon Documents for the Most Part Hitherto Unpublished (London: J. C. Nimmo, 1891; repr. 1969), pp. 83–91; and Joanna Kostylo, ‘Commentary on Johannes of Speyer’s Venetian monopoly (1469)’, in Primary Sources on Copyright (1450–1900), ed. by Lionel Bently and M. Kretschmer, http://www.copyrighthistory.org/record/i_1469 [accessed 23 December 2016]. 23 Jean-Barthélemy Vincent, Essai sur l’histoire de l’imprimerie en Belgique, depuis le xve jusqu’à la fin du xviiie siècle (Brussels: J.  Delfosse, 1867), pp.  77–80, 190–93; and Auguste Vincent, ‘La Typographie bruxelloise aux xviie et xviiie siècles’, in Histoire du livre et de l’imprimerie en Belgique, iv, pp. 12–14. 24 Philippe Rombouts, Certificats délivrés aux imprimeurs des Pays-Bas par Christophe Plantin et autres documents se rapportant à la charge du Prototypographe (Antwerp: Buschmann; Ghent: Hoste, 1881); Max Rooses, Christophe Plantin, imprimeur anversois (Antwerp: J. Maes, 1882), pp. 199–209; Michel Baelde, ‘De toekenning van drukkersoctrooien door de Geheime Raad in de zestiende eeuw’, De Gulden Passer, 40 (1962), 19–58; Micheline Soenen, ‘Impression et commerce des livres aux xvie et xviie siècles. Réflexions en marge d’un inventaire de cartons du Conseil privé espagnol’, Archives et Bibliothèques de Belgique, 56 (1985), 72–92; and Aline Goosens, Les Inquisitions modernes dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux (1520–1633), 2 vols (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1997–98), i, pp. 47–112. 25 Jean Baptiste Van der Straelen, Jaerboek der vermaerde en kunstryke gilde van sint Lucas binnen de stad Antwerpen (Antwerp: J. Peeters-Van Genechten, 1855); Rombouts and Van Lerius, Les ‘Liggeren’, i, pp. i–vii; Jan Van der Stock, ‘De Antwerpse Sint-Lucasgilde en de drukkers-uitgegevers: “middeleeuws” achterhoedegevecht of paradigma van cultureelpolitieke machtsverschuivingen?’, in Boeken in de late Middeleeuwen. Verslag van de Groningse Codicologendagen 1992, ed. by Jos M. M. Hermans and Klaas van der Hoek (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1994), pp. 155–65; Van der Stock, Printing Images, pp. 27–57; Van der Stighelen and Vermeylen, ‘The Antwerp Guild’, pp. 189–208; and Maximiliaan P. J. Martens and Natasja Peeters, ‘Artists by Numbers: Quantifying Artists’ Trades in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp’, in Making and Marketing: Studies of Painting Process in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Workshops, ed.  by Molly Faries, (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), pp. 211–22. 26 Rombouts and Van Lerius, Les ‘Liggeren’, i, pp. 83, 108, 117, 142. 27 ‘Een poertere moeten worde ofte poertere sijn’. Van der Straelen, Jaerboek, p. 2. 22

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(‘sheriff ’) and the aldermen of the city.28 The right of citizenship also included legal exemptions and tax privileges.29 The Guild of Saint Luke tried to extend its influence over the printers, just as it had over the illuminators. A 1495 trial, which was brought against the printer Adriaen van Liesvelt by the guild, perfectly summarizes this attempt. Before the aldermen of the city, Liesvelt was accused of using oil and varnish (i.e. the materials of a painter) in his illustrations, an accusation which the guild hoped would require his affiliation. The printer, in his defence, replied that he used no colours or brushes, but only paper and ink. The guild’s case was dismissed and Liesvelt was permitted to continue his activities without any interference.30 This trial had serious consequences for the corporation because it formalized the possibility for anyone to exercise freely the art of printing, on the condition that the printer did not interfere with the activities of the illuminators. Despite this relative independence, more than half of the active typographers in the city before 1520 were affiliated with the Guild of Saint Luke.31 In addition to defending the professional interests of its members, the Guild of Saint Luke contributed directly to the propagation of Low Countries urban culture. From around 1480, the guild hosted the rhetorical chamber named De Violieren.32 The factor — the lead poet and playwright — participated regularly in competitions organized either in Antwerp or in neighbouring towns to defend the honour of his chamber. When ­travelling, the factor was usually accompanied by the prince of the chamber (a sort of patron of the arts), by members of the guild, and by representatives of the local authorities.33 These events were thus an opportunity for printers to develop special bonds with their fellow citizens and to build relationships outside the city walls. For example, Govaert Bac and Jan de Beer, as deans of the guild, took an active part in the organization of the joyous entry of Archduke Charles in Antwerp on 12 February 1515. The celebration, which lasted more than ten days, from 9 to 22 February, was punctuated by numerous ceremonies, ­banquets, tournaments, and plays.34 A few months later, on 22 July, the two deans travelled to ­Mechelen for a regional rhetoricians competition, escorted by members of the city council, eight knights, and the prince of rhetoric Benedictus

Coutumes du Pays et duché de Brabant. Quartier d’Anvers, ed. by Guillaume De Longé, 7 vols (Brussels: F. Gobbaerts, 1870–76), i, pp. 274–75. 29 Coutumes du Pays, i, pp. 274–95. 30 Antwerp, SA, Vonnisboek 1232 (1494–1502), fol. 22r, edited in Van der Stock, ‘De Antwerpse’, pp. 162–63, nos 1–2. 31 The dates of printers’ registrations in Antwerp are as follows: Govaert Bac (1493), Adriaen van Berghen (before 1505), Symon Cock (1557), Jan Dingelsche (before 1532), Henrick Eckert (1520), Mathias van der Goes (1487), Gheraert Leeu (1485), Jacob van Liesvelt (1536), and Willem Vorsterman (1512). See Rombouts and Van Lerius, Les ‘Liggeren’, i, pp. 37, 39, 45, 63, 76, 94, 117, 127, 203. 32 On chambers of rhetoric and especially those of Antwerp, see Henri Liebrecht, Les Chambres de rhétorique (Brussels: La Renaissance du Livre, 1948); Emile Coornaert, ‘Les Chambres de rhétorique en Flandre’, Comptes-rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 114 (1970), pp. 195–200; Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, ‘De Violieren’, in Repertorium van rederijkerskamers in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden en Luik 1400–1650, http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/brua002repe01_01 [accessed 23 December 2016]; Van Bruaene, ‘“A Wonderfull Tryumfe, for the Wynnyng of a Pryse”: Guilds, Ritual, Theater, and the Urban Network in the Southern Low Countries, ca. 1450–1650’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59  (2006), 374–405; and Van Bruaene, Om beters wille. Rederijkerskamers en de stedelijke cultuur in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (1400–1650) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008). 33 For details of the movements of De Violieren until 1520, see Rombouts and Van Lerius, Les ‘Liggeren’, i, pp. 39, 43, 45, 47, 49, 52, 56, 59, 63, 65, 68, 72, 80, 83, 91, 96. 34 Pierre Génard, ‘Joyeuse entrée et inauguration de l’archiduc Charles à Anvers, en 1515’, Bulletin de la Commission royale d’histoire, S. 4, 1 (1873), 387–406; and Louis Prosper Gachard, Collection des voyages des souverains des Pays-Bas, 4 vols (Brussels: F. Hayez, 1874–82), ii, p. 14. 28

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Opitiis (1476–1544), church organist of Our Lady from 1511 to 1516.35 The procession comprised more than 600 people who marched all dressed in identical costumes. Thanks to its magnificence, Antwerp won the prize for the most beautiful entry.36 The Guild of Saint Luke thus gave printers an opportunity to integrate themselves into Antwerp’s urban associative network. Additionally, the sharing of community experiences encouraged them to favour the emergence of a sense of identity that was not strictly related to geographical origins. Familial Networks Although we are relatively well informed about the descendants of early typographers, information about their families and their ancestry is very limited; the names of one or both parents is only known for fewer than ten typographers.37 For instance, we have established the father’s profession of only two printers: Jan de Gheet, whose father was an Antwerp taelspreker (‘lawyer’);38 and Thomas van der Noot, illegitimate son of Aerts, a Brussels alderman and the lord of Lombeek (d. c. 1491).39 Two of Theodoricus Martinus’s family members embraced a religious career: his sister Margareta (d. 1510) and his cousin Reynier (d.  1515).40 Volckaert van Liesvelt (d.  c.  1510), Adriaen’s brother and Jacob’s

Benedictus Opitiis composed the hymn, which was printed in August 1515 by Jan de Gheet (NB 23164), in honour of the joyous entry of Charles  V to Antwerp. He left the Low Countries for the court of Henry  VIII in 1516, and later returned to settle on the Continent in the region of Ulm, where he died in 1544. See Prosper Verheyden, ‘De Drukker en de Componist van het Maximiliaan-boek’, Antwerpsch Archievenblad, S. 2, 3 (1928), 268–82; and Guido Persoons, De orgels en de organisten van de Onze Lieve Vrouwkerk te Antwerpen van 1500 tot 1650 (Brussels: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België. Klasse der Schone Kunsten, 1981), pp. 63–64. 36 Rombouts and Van Lerius, Les ‘Liggeren’, i, pp.  83–84. After the death of Govaert Bac, Jan de Beer filed a lawsuit against the typographer’s widow. He asked her to present her husband’s accounts and to settle the debts owed the guild for the joyous entry and travel to Mechelen. See Antwerp, SA, Vonnisboek 1235, fol. 139v; and D. Ewing, ‘Some Documentary Additions to the Biography of Jan de Beer’, Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (1983), 85–103 (pp. 93–98). The burden of dean could be extremely expensive and sometimes other deans had to pay in order to clear the accounts, as in 1499 when Heynderic Scilleman and Heynderic van Wueluwe discharged the debts of their two predecessors Jan Snel and Merten van Doornick, deans in 1494. See Rombouts and Van Lerius, Les ‘Liggeren’, i, p. 55. 37 We know the names of the children of thirteen printers: Govaert Bac, Symon Cock, Henrick Eckert, Jan de Gheet, Mathias van der Goes, Claes de Grave, Michiel Hillen, Gheraert Leeu, Adriaen and Jacob van Liesvelt, Theodoricus Martinus, Henrick Pieterszoon, and Willem Vorsterman; we know the names of the parents of only nine printers: Adriaen van Berghen, Symon Cock, Jan de Gheet, Mathias van der Goes, Claes de Grave, Michiel Hillen, Claes and Gheraert Leeu, and Theodoricus Martinus. 38 His father is first documented in 1486 and died before 28 March 1509. See P.  Verheyden, ‘De Drukker en de Componist van het Maximiliaan-boek’, Antwerpsch Archievenblad, S. 2, 3 (1928), 268–82 (pp. 269–70, 273). 39 Adam, ‘Imprimeurs’, i, p. 170. 40 His sister Margareta joined the Beguinage of Aalst before 1477 and led the institution during the last twenty years of her life. See Aalst, SA, Schepenboek 580, fol. 22v; Ernest Soens, Cartularium en renteboek van het Begijnhof Ste Katharina op den Zavel te Aalst (Aalst: Spitaels-Schuermans, 1912), pp. 54, 57; and Kamiel Heireman, Tentoonstelling Dirk Martens 1473–1973. Tentoonstelling over het werk, de persoon en het milieu van Dirk Martens, ingericht bij de herdenking van het verschijnen te Aalst in 1473 van het eerste gedrukte boek in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (Aalst: Stedelijk Museum, 1973), p. 30. Their cousin Reynier, son of Cornelis Martens, joined the Williamite convent of Aalst and took the position of deacon in 1491. See Aalst, SA, Schepenboek, 608, fol. 44r; Frans de Potter and Jan Broeckaert, Geschiedenis der stad Aalst. Voorgegaan van eene historische schets van ‘t voormalige land van Aalst, 4 vols (Ghent: Annoot-Braeckman, 1873–76), iii, p. 336; Heireman, Tentoonstelling, p. 30; and José Verschaeren, De orde van de Wilhelmieten in België. Monasticon (Brussels: Royal Archives of Belgium, 1998), p. 33. 35

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uncle, is documented in Antwerp’s archives as a painter;41 Jan de Gheet’s uncle, Cornelis (d. c. 1516/7), was a sculptor.42 We have also found little information concerning the socio-economic situation of printers’ wives’ families. Theodoricus Martinus married a sister (whose name is unknown) of Bartel Coecke, bell-founder and member of a renowned family of artisans from Aalst; painter and bookseller Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502–50) is one of its most famous representatives.43 Kathlyne Houtmaert alias van der Meer, who married (consecutively) the printers Mathias van der Goes and Govaert Bac, could be a relative of the printer Jacob Jacobsz. van der Meer from Delft;44 the bookseller Willem Houtmaert may have been her brother or cousin.45 The wife of Willem Vorsterman, Maria de Lichte, is the sister of Peter, cousmakere (‘sock manufacturer’), and the illegitimate daughter of Magdalene van Zelle, who was married to the carpenter Anthonis van Eynde (d. c. 1517).46 Sculptors, booksellers, artists, and merchants: the pioneers of Antwerp typography seem to have emerged from families in a sort of middle class composed mainly of merchants and craftsmen. Given that their numbers were too few either to organize themselves into a guild or to legally regulate entrance into their profession, did the first printers implement social strategies to control, as much as possible, the family origins of potential newcomers? We will explore this question by examining two indicators: family marriage practices and children’s career choices. Two of Michiel Hillen’s four children worked in the handpress book industry. One of his three daughters, Margriete (d. 1542), married the Antwerp bookseller and printer Jan Steels (d. 1562) before 17 March 1536.47 The guardians of her children (Frans, Jan, and Yda) were her husband, her father, and her brother Jan Hillen.48 The latter died before 5 July 1543 and no longer appears in the list of guardians after this date.49 Jan Hillen began his career in Antwerp in 1526 by printing Lutheran books under various pseudonyms, including Adam Anonymus from Basel. He then moved to Lübeck (1531–32) and Malmö (1533–35), where he continued to print Lutheran books. He returned to his hometown in 1535 and worked with his father between 1540 and 1543.50

We cannot associate Volckaert van Liesvelt with any extant painting, however, nor find his name in the members’ list of the Guild of Saint Luke. He married Engele Fyen, sister of the blacksmith Jorijs, on 6 May 1496, and died before 1510. See Antwerp, SA, SR 109 (1496), fol. 195r; and SR 137 (1510), fol. 195r. 42 Cornelis de Gheet was already mentioned in 1477 as a free-master in Antwerp. He took several apprentices (in 1477, 1484, 1492, 1495, and 1503) and was elected dean of the guild in 1488. See Rombouts and Van Lerius, Les ‘Liggeren’, i, pp. 27, 36, 40, 45, 51. 43 Potter and Broeckaert, Geschiedenis, ii, pp. 69, 71; iv, p. 293. 44 Mathias van der Goes bought his first types in Delft from Jacob Jacobsz. van der Meer. Perhaps van der Goes was the apprentice of van der Meer. See Cinquième centenaire, pp. 262–79; Adam, ‘Imprimeurs’, i, p. 137. 45 Antwerp, SA, SR 139  (1511), fol.  65r–v, edited in Jan Cools, ‘Godevaert Bac’, De Gulden Passer, 1  (1923), 173–81 (pp. 179–80, no. 3). 46 Antwerp, SA, SR 116 (1499), fol. 219r; and SR 149 (1516), fol. 408r. 47 Antwerp, SA, SR 187 (1535), fol. 349r. On Steels, see Rouzet, Dictionnaire, pp. 208–9; and Pedro R. León, ‘Brief Notes on Some 16th-Century Antwerp Printers with Special Reference to Jean Steelsius and His Hispanic Bibliography’, De Gulden Passer, 54 (1976), 77–92. 48 Antwerp, SA, SR 208 (1542), fol. 87v. 49 Antwerp, SA, SR 210 (1543), fol. 171v. 50 Maria E. Kronenberg, ‘De geheimzinnige drukkers Adam Anonymus te Bazel en Hans Luft te Marburg ontmaskerd (1526–28, 1528–30 en 1535)’, Het Boek, S. 2, 8  (1919), 241–80; Rouzet, Dictionnaire, pp.  93–94; and Jean-François Gilmont, La Réforme et le Livre. L’Europe de l’imprimé (1517–v. 1570) (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1990), pp. 201–3. 41

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Claes de Grave’s son Jan succeeded his father. He published his first book under his own name in 1543 and ended his career in Antwerp in 1551.51 The activities of Symon Cock’s workshop were maintained after his death by his stepson Claes van den Wouwere (d. c. 1569), a bookbinder who married Cock’s only daughter, Catlyne (d. before 1576).52 The son of Willem Vorsterman, Willem de Jonge, is documented as a boekverkoper (‘bookseller’) in the Antwerp archives from 1 December 1537 to 11 May 1541.53 Printing workshops were not systematically taken over by printers’ children or sons-in-law, however. Many children worked in businesses other than the handpress book industry, or chose an ecclesiastical career. Marie and Gheertruyde Leeu, for instance, entered the convent of Our Lady in Gouda.54 Jan van der Goes, son of Mathias, joined the Abbey of Saint Michael in Antwerp before 13 March 1511.55 The executorship account of Michiel Hillen, dated 23 January 1559, mentioned his daughter Lievyne as a nun in the Convent of the Third Order of Saint Francis of Antwerp.56 These and other factors might account for the sale of printers’ workshops or equipment outside the family. For instance, on 30 October 1516, a few months before his death, Govaert Bac sold his workshop — ’t Vogelhuis (‘The Bird House’), which was located on the Steenhouwersvest — to the coopman (‘merchant’) ‘Franse Berckmans’.57 This buyer can be identified with the bookseller Franz Birckmann from Cologne, who worked with several booksellers in Northern Europe from 1504 to 1530.58 Henrick Eckert’s types were sold before 6 November 1525 to the Antwerp printer Jan van Ghelen (d. c. 1549–50).59 Willem van Vissenaken and Adriaen Verbruggen purchased the workshop of Willem Vorsterman after his death on 3 December 1543.60 In fine, relatively few members of Antwerp’s printer families continued the enterprise of their parents, which had the effect of providing opportunities to many newcomers. Indeed, from 1530 to 1540 the number of newcomers reached nearly two-thirds of the forty active typographers in Antwerp. Nevertheless, the seeds of a form of social endogamy had been sown; they give birth to the great seventeenth-century printer dynasties such as the Verdussens in Antwerp, the t’Serstevens in Brussels, and the Hovius in Liège.61

Rouzet, Dictionnaire, p. 81. Rombouts and Van Lerius, Les ‘Liggeren’, i, p. 226. Claes van den Wouwere died before 10 June 1569; his wife died before 23 February 1576. See Antwerp, SA, Vonnisboek 1396 (1568–70), fol. 120v. On van den Wouvere, see Jan Cools, ‘Simon Cock (1481–1562)’, De Gulden Passer, 3 (1925), 21–31 (pp. 25, 27–29); and Rouzet, Dictionnaire, p. 250. 53 Antwerp, SA, Vonnisboek 1385 (1534–39), unfoliated; Vonnisboek 1386 (1539–43), fols  27v, 93r–v; and SR 203 (1541), fol. 173r. 54 Antwerp, SA, SR 108 (1495), fol. 255r. 55 Antwerp, SA, SR 138 (1510), fol. 264r. 56 Antwerp, SA, SR 270 (1558), fols 169r–176r. 57 Antwerp, SA, SR 150 (1516), fol. 185r–v. 58 Rouzet, Dictionnaire, pp. 19–20. 59 Antwerp, SA, SR 167 (1525), fol. 224r. 60 Antwerp, SA, SR 209 (1543), fol. 306r. 61 On these families, see inter alia Sophie Vandepontseele, ‘Les Fricx, les Foppens et les T’Serstevens (1670–1791): activités et production de trois dynasties d’imprimeurs-libraires bruxellois d’après les octrois d’admission et d’impression’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Catholic University of Louvain, 1997); Adresboek van de zeventiende-eeuwse drukkers, uitgevers en boekverkopers in Vlaanderen, ed. by Koen De Vlieger-De Wilde (Antwerp: Vereniging van Antwerpse Bibliofielen, 2004), pp. 66–73, 101; Stijn van Rossem, ‘The Bookshop of the Counter-Reformation Revisited: The Verdussen Company and the Trade in Catholic Publications, Antwerp, 1585–1648’, Quaerendo, 38 (2008), 306–21; and Pierre Marie Gason, ‘Le Livre imprimé sous l’Ancien Régime’, in Florilège du livre en Principauté de Liège du ixe au xviiie siècle, ed. by Paul Bruyère and Alain Marchandisse (Liège: Société des Bibliophiles liégeois, 2009), pp. 213–27. 51 52

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The nature and extent of familial networks of solidarity can be understood by studying the legal steps taken following the death of a parent, when the circle of relationships came into its full role of assistance to orphans and the partially orphaned. The duty of relatives and friends was to protect minor children and to preserve their inheritance; legal guardianship procedures thus reveal network ties within and among printing families.62 In the Antwerp archives, lists of momboirs (‘guardians’) are introduced by the formula vrienden en maghen, which can be translated as ‘friends and relatives’.63 The Antwerp archives show that at least seven of the twenty typographers who owned a printing shop before 1520 were designated as guardians — some of them more than once — and that four died or lost their wives while their children were still minors.64 The orphans (or partially orphaned children) left behind were assisted by a total of twelve different guardians. Printers jointly supervised the goods of thirteen different families. The law did not fix the number of guardians, which could vary between two and four. When Paesschyne Spillemant, the first wife of Henrick Eckert, died in 1511, Michiel Hillen and the bookseller Cornelis de Grave were designated to defend the interests of Eckert’s three daughters.65 In 1493, Govaert Bac was appointed, together with three others, to watch over the inheritance of bookseller Joos van Offen’s three children.66 The bookseller Willem Houtmaert, along with Mathias van der Goes and Govaert Bac, was charged with protecting the interests of Kathlyne van der Meer’s children.67 Family solidarity was deemed important within the milieu of Antwerp typographers: six printers had the task of administering the property of orphans within their own family.68 Willem Vorsterman, for example, cared for the children of his brother-in-law Peter Lichte after the death of Lichte’s wife in 1524, and Jacob van Liesvelt appeared in 1531 on the list of guardians of his cousin Frans, son of the painter Volckaert (d. c. 1510).69 The profiles of these guardians reveal that avuncular relationships were most often called upon in the case of minor orphans.70 Grandparents, in contrast, were seldom appointed as guardians: Michiel Hillen, who was the guardian of his deceased daughter’s children, is the only case in our corpus.71 Examples of fruitful social history studies employing these kinds of primary sources include Sylvie Perrier, ‘Rôle des réseaux de parenté dans l’éducation des mineurs orphelins selon les comptes de tutelle parisiens (xviie–xviiie siècles)’, Annales de démographie historique (1995), 125–35; Liens sociaux et actes notariés dans le monde urbain en France et en Europe, ed. by Vincent Gourdon, Scarlett Beauvalet, and François-Joseph Ruggiu (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris Sorbonne, 2004); Claire Lemercier, ‘Analyse de réseaux et histoire de la famille: une rencontre encore à venir?’, Annales de démographie historique (2005), 7–31 (pp. 9–10); and Marion Trévisi, Au cœur de la parenté. Oncles et tantes dans la France des Lumières (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris Sorbonne, 2008), pp. 344–74. 63 On legal guardianship legislation in the Low Countries and more specifically in Antwerp, see Coutumes du Pays, i, pp.  295–305; Philippe Godding, ‘Le Contrôle des tutelles par le Magistrat urbain dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux’, in L’Initiative publique des communes en Belgique: fondements historiques (Ancien Régime). Onzième colloque international, Spa, 1–4 septembre 1982, actes (Brussels: Crédit communal de Belgique, 1984), pp. 557–68; and Philippe Godding, Le Droit privé dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux du 12e au 18e siècle (Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1987), pp. 124–38. 64 The printers concerned are Govaert Bac, Adriaen van Berghen, Jan van Doesborch, Henrick Eckert, Jan de Gheet, Mathias van der Goes, Michiel Hillen, Jan van Liesvelt, and Willem Vorsterman. 65 Antwerp, SA, SR, 137 (1510), fol. 297r–v. 66 Antwerp, SA, Certificatieboek 2, fol. 200r. 67 Antwerp, SA, SR 102 (1492), fol. 132v; and SR 139 (1511), fol. 65r–v, edited in Cools, ‘Godevaert Bac’, p. 178, no. 1; pp. 179–80, no. 3. 68 Govaert Bac, Henrick Eckert, Jan de Gheet, Michiel Hillen, Jacob van Liesvelt, and Willem Vorsterman. 69 Antwerp, SA, SR 165 (1524), fol. 148r–v; and SR 179 (1531), fol. 292r. 70 This observation has been most extensively noted and explored with reference to society during the Ancien Régime in, for instance, Perrier, ‘Rôle des réseaux’, pp. 129–30; Marion Trévisi, ‘Oncles et tantes au xviiie siècle: au cœur de la parenté, quel présence, quels rôles?’, Histoire, économie et société, 23 (2004), 283–302 (pp. 295–97); and Trévisi, Au cœur, pp. 344–74. 71 Antwerp, SA, SR 208 (1542), fol. 87v. 62

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The choice of guardian was not restricted to printers (family or not); it also extended to other members of the book profession, specifically booksellers (three) and bookbinders (three). Henrick Eckert provides us with a good example: the management of his six children’s inheritance — the children were from two marriages — was assigned to the printers Michiel Hillen, Jacob van Liesvelt, and Adriaen van Berghen; to the bookbinders Jan Faes and Adriaen van Hoelwyck; and to the bookseller Cornelis de Grave.72 The decision to entrust guardianships to them can also be explained by good neighbourly relations, as the three printers and Adriaen van Hoelwyck all lived near Eckert, close to the Kammerpoort. It might seem surprising to find, among the various people involved in these guardianships, a blacksmith, a cooper, a fishmonger, and a meevercoopere (‘madder seed seller’).73 Although these guardians might have been relatives — we were unable to verify this — we should not forget that some aspects of their activities were connected with the book industry: blacksmiths contributed to the provision of some raw materials; books travelled in barrels; fishbone was necessary for the composition of some bookbinder glues; and madder seeds were used to make red inks. While examining the composition of guardianships is invaluable in that it reflects the extent of typographer networks, it does not allow us to measure the full complexity of their interpersonal relationships. Govaert Bac’s network offers a beautiful illustration of the intricacies of these social bonds. A schematization of the relationships he forged shows that social networks were not just made of binary relations, but also involved membership in different circles of sociability (Figure 1).74 The guardians of Govaert Bac’s children were the printer Willem Vorsterman, the cooper Jacop Marsijs, the bookseller Willem Houtmaert, and a man named Jan Boot, whose profession is unknown.75 As noted above, in 1493 Govaert Bac was appointed guardian of the the bookseller Joos van Offen’s three children, together with Jan van der Beke, Canon and Treasurer of the Church of Our Lady; Jan van Oekelom, mercer; and Willem Aerts, fishmonger. In 1492, the latter was also selected as the guardian of printer Mathias van der Goes’ two boys, together with booksellers Joos van Offen and Willem Houtmaert, who was — to expose yet more entanglements — simultaneously responsible for guarding Govaert Bac’s children’s inheritance after the death of his first wife, who was also Mathias van der Goes’ widow. Govaert Bac was also a participant in other social circles, as is illustrated by his involvement with the blacksmith Jan Alleyns’s two children’s inheritance, together with Gielis and Marten Alleyns, who may have been brothers.76 In addition, the printer can be found at the intersection of other kinship networks: on 11 January 1516, Willem Vorsterman, the guardian of Bac’s two boys and two girls, bought part of the legacy of the carpenter Anthonis van den Heyden, his late stepfather, who had previously married Govaert Bac’s sister-in-law.77 The typographer’s relationships even extended beyond the English Channel. Together with Godfrey Haerst, Bac was appointed the executor for London bookseller Antwerp, SA, SR 137 (1510), fol. 297r–v; and SR 169 (1526), fol. 95v. Antwerp, SA, SR 101 (1492), fol. 119v, edited in Cools, ‘Godevaert Bac’, pp. 178–79, no. 2; SR 155 (1519), fols 113v– 14r, edited in Cools, ‘Godevaert Bac’, pp. 180–81, no. 4; and SR 270 (1558), fols 169r–76r. 74 See Alain Degenne’s reflections about this in ‘Sur les réseaux de sociabilité’, Revue française de sociologie, 24 (1983), 109–18 (pp. 111, 114–15). 75 Antwerp, SA, SR 139 (1511), fol. 65r–v, edited in Cools, ‘Godevaert Bac’, pp. 179–80, no. 3. 76 Antwerp, SA, SR 137 (1508), fol. 202r. 77 Antwerp, SA, SR 148 (1515), fol. 253r. 72 73

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John Boeidens (d.  1503), a native of Antwerp. Boeidens, in turn, was the godfather of one of Bac’s two daughters.78 Other Antwerp expats living in London were included in relationships with Govaert Bac as well: Jan Vent and Richaert Wissen twice gave the typographer power of attorney, first in 1505 and a second time in 1506, to claim on their behalf and on behalf of their wives the inheritance they had yet to receive from their uncle by marriage, the boilermaker Andries Gollens, who had died in Antwerp.79 One of the guardian’s main tasks concerned the management of orphan inheritances. Guardians were responsible for making inheritances grow, most often through the acquisition or sale of hereditary annuities. For example, on 16 December 1510, Govaert Bac, Gielis and Marten Alleyns — Dierick and Anna Alleyns’s guardians — sold to Magriete Bouwens, widow of Adriaen van Eeckeren, the hereditary annuity they had bought on 5 May 1508 from Lysbeth sBeeren.80 On 12 July 1524, Willem Vorsterman and the guardians of his sister-in-law’s children acquired an annuity on the house De Gulden Sterre (‘The Golden Star’), located on the Melckbrugge (Milk Bridge).81 Guardians were also responsible for the payment of debts on behalf of the deceased parent. On 14 June 1526, Adriaen van Bergen, Jacob van Liesvelt, Jan Faes, and Adriaen van Hoelwyck had to pay a debt of 300 golden guilders that Henrick Eckert owed the Nuremberg bookseller Melchior Koberger.82 In addition, guardians were to defend the interests of minors in their care. Following Kathlyne Houtmaert’s death, Willem Vorsterman, Jacob Marssijs, and Willem Houtmaert were charged with ensuring that her legacy — half of the Vogelhuis on the Steenhouwersvest — would be preserved for the two boys from her previous marriage. Moreover, Govaert Bac had to give them a hereditary annuity of five pounds on the house.83 This clause in her will explains the cancellation and renegotiation in 1519 of the sale of the Vogelhuis three years earlier by Bac, who had not taken into account his first wife’s heirs.84 The two main pillars on which was forged the solidarity between people, as exemplified by Bac’s relationships, is perfectly illustrated by the formula vrienden ende maghen that we find in the acts of notaries. Family networks acted in support of and were in turn supported by the maghen, the relatives, while the vrienden, the friends, were often people from the book trade or related professionals. None of these networks were built on a binary model, but were instead the result of an articulation within and among different circles of relationships.

John Boeidens alias Balduinus, native of Antwerp, established his bookshop in the Parish of Saint Clement Eastcheap in London. His will was written on 11 October 1501 and was recorded after his death on 30 March 1503. He bequeathed the sum of 40s. to his goddaughter Elizabeth Bac. See London, National Archives, Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills, 22, Blamyr, fol. 188r–v. On Boeidens, see Edward Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 A.D., 5 vols (London and Birmingham: privately printed, 1875–94; repr. 1967), ii, p. 7; and Edward Gordon Duff, A Century of the English Book Trade: Short notices of All Printers, Stationers, Book-Binders, and Others Connected with it from the Issue of the First Dated Book in 1457 to the Incorporation of the Company of Stationers in 1557 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1905), p. 15. 79 Antwerp, SA, SR 127 (1505), fol. 45r; and SR 129 (1506), fol. 116v. 80 Antwerp, SA, SR 137 (1508), fol. 202r. 81 Antwerp, SA, SR 165 (1524), fol. 148r–v. 82 Antwerp, SA, SR 169 (1526), fol. 95v. 83 Antwerp, SA, SR 102 (1492), fol. 132v, edited in Cools, ‘Godevaert Bac’, p. 178, no. 1. 84 Antwerp, SA, SR 155 (1519), fols 113v–114r, edited in Cools, ‘Godevaert Bac’, pp. 180–81, no. 4. 78

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Conclusion Printers found their place in the urban landscape of Antwerp with other craftsmen already involved in the book industry. They opened printing shops in the immediate vicinity of booksellers and binders workshops. This proximity was consolidated by strong familial and quasi-familial relationships such as guardianships. Similarly, registration in a professional guild, like the Guild of Saint Luke, enabled printers to take part in the socio-cultural life of Antwerp and to integrate more widely into the society of the city. These networks — whether familial or professional — were also important in economic terms. In some cases, an enterprise’s sustainability was assured through the marriage of a printer’s daughter to another typographer or artisan of the book. In other instances, these networks allowed a printer’s family to preserve its economic capital after his death, through the defence of its interests or through the sale of his typographical material. These printer pioneers, from their many and various origins and with their increasingly deep integration into the urban fabric of Antwerp, laid the foundation for a community whose structures would continue beyond the seventeenth century.

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Govaert Bac’s Network The direction of the arrows indicates the direction of the tutelary relationship. The broken arrows do not relate to the practice of guardianship, but to the management of the property of a decedent. This schema is based on the following archives: Antwerp, SA, Certificatieboek 2, fol. 200r; SR 137 (1509), fol. 202r; SR 139 (1511), fol. 65r–v; SR 143 (1513), fols 255r–56r; SR 155 (1519), fols 113v–14r; and London, National Archives, Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills, 22, Blamyr, fol. 188r–v.

A. van den Heyden (carpenter)

Rombout Keynout (?)

Marten Alleyns (brother?)

Lysbeth Thymans (sister-in-law)

Gielis Alleyns (brother?)

Jan Loomans (madder seed seller)

Willem Houtmaert (bookseller)

Jan Alleyns (blacksmith)

Mathias van der Goes (printer)

GOVAERT BAC (PRINTER)

Willem Vorsterman (printer) Jan Boot (?)

W. Aerts (fishmonger) Jacop Marsijs (cooper) Joos van Offen (bookseller)

Jan van der Beke (canon)

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Jan van Oekelom (mercer)

John Boeidens (bookseller)

Godfrey Haerst (?)

What Constitutes Sculpture? The Guild Dispute of 1544 over the Saint Gertrude Choir Stalls in Leuven* Angela Glover University of Toronto

What constituted sculpture in the sixteenth century? Our encounters with sculpture today, particularly in museums, obscure the fact that artists and patrons of the time classified carved objects according to criteria that we might not expect. A legal dispute of 1544 regarding the choir stalls of Saint Gertrude Abbey in Leuven casts interesting light on this question. These sixteenth-century stalls, heavily damaged in the Second World War but still in situ in the abbey church, are replete with remarkably varied carving: figural and non-figural; relief and sculpture in the round; simple and complex imagery (Figure 1).1 Admired for centuries, this lavish work was a source of contention at the time that the set was completed in the early 1540s. At issue was the status of the carving: the metsers’ (‘masons’’) guild maintained that only their members had the right to fashion beel[d]snyden (‘carved figures’). They consequently took the maker of the stalls, who was a member of the scrynmakers’ (‘joiners’’) guild, to court. The joiners responded that the carvings were not independent beelden (‘statues’), but rather cyrate (‘ornament’), which formed an integral part of the choir stalls and therefore fell within the purview of the joiners’, not the masons’ guild. In the end, the joiners convinced the court that the carving on the stalls was, indeed, ornament, and the masons were forced to pay the expenses for their unsuccessful suit.2 While this argument Many thanks to Professors Anne-Laure Van Bruaene and Ethan Matt Kavaler for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Thank you also to Professor Merlijn Hurx for sharing his knowledge about guild practices. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), for which I am very grateful. 1 In the nineteenth century, the stalls were moved and modified to conform to changes in liturgy and fashion. In May 1944, they were shattered when bombs destroyed the choir. After the war, with the help of photographic documentation, the surviving remains were restored; this accounts for the differences in wood colour that clearly distinguish the original, as well as surviving parts of the nineteenth-century canopy, from later replacement materials. Since this restoration, time, wear, insect infestation, and the theft of niche figures have further damaged the stalls. For details regarding the post-war and 1990 restorations, see Maurits Smeyers and Marjan Buyle, ‘De koorbanken van de Sint-Geertruikerk te Leuven’, Monumenten en Landscappen, 10:3 (May–June 1991), 41–60 (pp. 51–56). 2 ‘Den selven pertyen vuygesproken en getermineert dat de metsers metter calengien en eysschen tegen Peeteren Hermans gedaen, niet en zyn ontfangbair, comdempnerende de geswoirenen vanden metsers inde costen van rechten inder saken gedaen ter behoirlycker taxatien’. 9 January 1544 (NS), Court of Aldermen’s register 1545, Chamber 2, Leuven (Stadsarchief Leuven no. 7828, fol. 199). This document should eventually be available online as part of the Itinera Nova project, begun in 2009, which aims to digitize all of the registers of the Court of Aldermen in Leuven from 1362 to 1795 (http://www.itineranova. be/in/home). For a printed transcription of the trial, see Jan Crab, Het Brabants Beeldsnijcentrum Leuven (Leuven: Vrienden van het Museum Leuven, 1977), Document 12, pp. 314–15; or Edward Van Even, ‘Les Auteurs de la tour, des stalles et du tabernacle de l’Eglise de Sainte-Gertrude à Louvain’, Bulletin des Commissions Royales d’art et d’archéologie, 14 (1875), 41–76 (pp. 62–63 n. 1). All quotations are from the latter, but discrepancies between the two transcriptions are trivial. *

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 99-111. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114003

Angela Glover

Fig. 1: North choir stalls, St Gertrude Abbey Church, Leuven. Photo: author. Reproduced with the permission of the Parochie Sint-Geertrui, Leuven.

appears in the highly-charged setting of a guild dispute, it nevertheless provides insight into how carved figures were perceived in the Low Countries in the mid-sixteenth century. Although changes in ideas about art and collecting, which had begun to shift in Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century,3 had led to an interest in new artistic forms (such as the freestanding statuette),4 most figural carving was not independent in the way we think of most sculpture today. Rather, it formed part of a building or part of a larger furnishing, such as an altarpiece. Furthermore, instead of being designed and executed by a single artist, most of this sculpture was made by a team whose members had a range of expertise. In this article, I will analyse the Saint Gertrude choir stall dispute within the broader context of guild practice, examining its significance for the perception of sculpture both for contemporaries and for our own age. The conflict between the masons and the joiners highlights the importance of knowing the procedures and protocols of construction for understanding the differing views of these objects in the sixteenth century. Given that many of the Netherlandish carvings in museums today are the types of objects that were under debate by the Leuven masons and joiners, this guild dispute adds to our comprehension of these works — and of their ambiguous and unstable status. As wooden objects, choir stalls could be made by any of the main woodworking professions: joiners, carpenters, or carvers. Joiners are woodworkers who use a variety of techniques to fasten pieces of wood together to create myriad objects, particularly furniture and Dagmar Eichberger, Leben mit Kunst, Wirken durch Kunst: Sammelwesen und Hofkunst unter Margarete von Österreich, Regentin der Niederlande (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), p. 429. 4 Jens Ludwig Burk, ‘Conrat Meit, Court Sculptor to Margaret of Austria’, in Women of Distinction: Margaret of York/ Margaret of Austria, ed. by Dagmar Eichberger (Leuven: Davidsfonds; Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 277–85 (p. 278). 3

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panelled fittings;5 carpenters are responsible for large wooden constructions, such as building frameworks;6 and carvers carve wood.7 Joiners were most commonly sought for choir stall commissions because the creation of solid seating requires competent joinery s­kills.8 However, an overlap in both the techniques used and the objects made by different types of woodworkers meant that differentiations among the woodworking professions were not always clear and sometimes contested. Furthermore, guild statutes were not standardized even within relatively small regions. In Bruges, for example, carpenters were responsible for the construction of interior fittings and large furnishings,9 both more ­customarily made by joiners elsewhere in northern Europe. Thus, the scope of each p­ rofession varied from place to place, with specific provisions employed to define clearly the role of each guild — such as the authorization to use glue, which sometimes distinguished joiners from other ­woodworkers.10 But even when guild statutes were explicit in their distinctions, there was sometimes a disparity between official rules and actual practice:11 certainly, some ­fluidity between closely related professions, whether official or not, helped ensure that fine ­distinctions did not disrupt trade with too much litigation.12 The construction of complex objects, such as choir stalls, frequently involved more than one type of woodworker or close collaboration with members of other trades. Since guild organization also differed significantly from town to town,13 collaboration and competition among guilds was influenced by how the crafts were divided up. There were a variety of reasons — historical, economic, and political — that might result in different trades uniting in a single guild. Some towns limited the number of guilds,14 and in such cases new trades were obliged to join already existing guilds to establish their rights. Guilds in some urban areas had so much political power that membership might be desirable primarily to capitalize on their beneficial networks.15 Sometimes trades established guilds with related groups (in Antwerp, for example, joiners were allied with coopers until 1495); at other times trades were grouped with unrelated professions. When particular objects necessitated close collaboration between workers from different guilds, the trades might find a way to facilitate production and to avoid conflicts. Occasionally, agreements were made between guilds, as in Antwerp when a ruling by the joiners’ guild in 1497 made it possible for carvers in the Guild of Saint Luke to employ journeymen joiners if the ­joiners’ guild gave permission. In other cases, guild organization changed to meet evolving The Oxford English Dictionary (OED Online 2010), s.v. ‘joiner, n.’. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED Online 2010), s.v. ‘carpenter’. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED Online 2010), s.v. ‘carver’. Kim W. Woods, Imported Images: Netherlandish Late Gothic Sculpture in England, c. 1400–c. 1550 (Donington, UK: Shaun Tyas, 2007), p. 6. 9 Jean-Pierre Sosson, Les Travaux publics de la ville de Bruges xiv e–xv e siècles: Les matériaux. Les hommes (Brussels: Crédit Communal de Belgique, 1977), p. 144. 10 For example, an agreement was made in 1455 in Bruges that altarpiece cases could be made by joiners or by carpenters, but that only the former could use glue. See Lynn F. Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, 1380–1550: Medieval Tastes and Mass Marketing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 210. 11 Gervase Rosser, ‘Crafts, Guilds, and the Negotiation of Work in the Medieval Town’, Past & Present, 154 (1997), 3–31 (p. 5). 12 Sosson, Les Travaux, pp. 145–46. 13 Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, ‘Craft Guilds in Comparative Perspective: The Northern and Southern Netherlands, a Survey’, in Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries: Work, Power, and Representation, ed. by Maarten Prak and others (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 1–31 (p. 8). 14 Bert De Munck, Piet Lourens, and Jan Lucassen, ‘The Establishment and Distribution of Craft Guilds in the Low Countries, 1000–1800’, in Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries, pp. 32–73 (p. 45). 15 Lis and Soly, ‘Craft Guilds’, p. 11. 5 6 7 8

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demands: in Mechelen in the 1540s, the woodcarvers left the guild of the stone sculptors to forge a new association with the painters’ guild, presumably because of the importance of polychromed wooden altarpieces to their livelihood. Splinter groups might break off from larger professions to ally themselves with close collaborators: in Antwerp some joiners who specialized as backmakers (‘case makers’) or metselriesnijders (‘tracery carvers’) became members of the Guild of Saint Luke along with painters and sculptors.16 Finally, multiple membership was used as another strategy for smoothing trade relations. Those who wanted to work in two closely related professions were the most likely to take advantage of this possibility, since little or no further training was required.17 Many smaller towns allowed masters to enrol in more than one guild, but many large towns (such as Bruges from 1442) forbade or restricted multiple membership.18 It was almost universally allowed, however, in sixteenth-century Ghent.19 For example, Gillis van Dickele initially trained as a joiner in Ghent, and subsequently became a member of the carvers’ guild, too.20 He was therefore able to promote himself as both a scrynwerckere and beeldesnydere to the nuns of Saint Clare in nearby Gentbrugge, who hired him to make a set of choir stalls.21 Competition from so-called foreign workers (those who did not have town citizenship), was a concern for all guilds. To protect their members, guilds normally required that tradespeople who were not town citizens pay fees for the right to work there. In the Low Countries, however, high-ranking nobles, city officials, and prominent ecclesiastics were frequently permitted to hire foreign workers, usually citing historical privileges. In Leuven, an ordinance of 15 June 1508 forbade the hiring of foreign workers, but made an exception for nobles and for the city.22 Even with such exemptions, compromises might be made to protect local workers: an agreement reached in Bruges in 1472 allowed the Duke of Burgundy’s court painter, Pierre Coustain, to work for the Duke’s court without becoming a guild member in Bruges, but his assistant, Jan de Hervy, was obliged to join the painters’ guild because his clientele included people outside the court.23 Thus there were a variety of ways that related and interdependent trades negotiated to promote interactions that were both harmonious and profitable for all parties. Nevertheless, the stakes were high — both economically and politically — and guild disputes — both internal and external — were inevitable and stemmed from a variety of sources. In Harald Deceulaer’s analysis of guild conflict settlements in Antwerp from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, he found that among related trades, such

Woods, Imported Images, p. 6. Johan Dambruyne, Corporatieve middengroepen: Aspiraties, relaties en transformaties in de 16e-eeuwse Gentse ambachtswereld (Ghent: Academia Press, 2002), p. 253. 18 Brecht Dewilde, ‘Corporaties en confrerieën in conflict: Leuven 1600–1750’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, KU Leuven, 2012), pp. 174–77. Thank you to Dr Dewilde for sharing his dissertation with me. 19 Dambruyne, Corporatieve, p. 253. 20 Erik Duverger, ‘Les Menuisiers et les sculpteurs gantois van Dickele au dernier quart du quinzième jusqu’au début du seizième siècle’, in Als Ich Can, ed. by Bert Cardon, Jan Van der Stock, and Dominique Vanwijnsberghe, 2 vols. (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), i, pp. 631–40 (p. 632). 21 Edmond de Busscher, Recherches sur les peintres et sculpteurs à Gand aux xvie, xviie et xviiie siècles (Ghent: Kessinger, 1866), pp. 227–28. 22 ‘Item dat neymant van buyten alleene sal moegen wercken hy en wercke onder enigen meester van den ambachte ende dat opde rechten die daer op staen, behalven voor den heere en der stadt’. Crab, Beeldsnijcentrum Leuven, p. 45 n. 65. 23 For further discussion of this and other cases involving foreign workers, see Merlijn Hurx, Architect en aannemer: De opkomst van de bouwmarkt in de Nederlanden, 1350–1530 (Nimeguen: Vantilt, 2012), pp. 54–60. 16 17

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as woodworkers, the most common type of dispute was between two guilds.24 It is hard to retrace all the steps taken before a guild dispute ended up in court (since this part of the process was seldom recorded, particularly if an agreement was reached before trial), but Deceulaer found that a verbal caution with some attempt at negotiation would normally take place before a lawsuit was considered, and that a settlement could come at any stage in the process before sentencing.25 His study also shows that the most common strategy used in guild disputes was to refer to written documents: privileges, formal guild agreements, or earlier judgments. When no such documentation was available, custom was frequently invoked.26 Under Dutch law, if it could be proved that a custom was justifiable, had been in place for a long time, and had been consistently upheld during that time, the custom could be made law.27 In cases where there were no relevant regulations or traditions, analogies or comparisons with rules from other guilds might be used. On occasion, theoretical or original legal scholarship could be cited as evidence.28 Since there are examples of all of these types of defences during the first half of the sixteenth century in Brabant, it seems likely that they were among the most common strategies not only during the later period covered by Deceulaer’s study, but also at this earlier time. No contract for the Saint Gertrude Abbey choir stalls survives, but it must have been around 1540 that the Brussels joiner, Mathys de Wayere, was hired to make the new stalls. We know little about De Wayere or about his other works, but we do know that he was advanced in his career at the time he began the Saint Gertrude stalls. He had become a citizen of Brussels in 1506 and practiced his trade within the Steenbickelerenambacht (‘stone sculptors’ guild’). In 1536, he was elected as a member of the steenbickeleren guild’s jury, proof of the extent of his experience and of his solid reputation.29 In Brussels, the old term steenbickeleer referred primarily to steenhouwers (‘stone cutters’) and metselaars (‘masons’), as well as to beeldhouwers (‘sculptors’) and schaliedekkers (‘slaters’), as can be seen in Jozef Duverger’s transcription of the guild’s extant membership lists from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries.30 A few other trades were also represented, such as vormsnideren (‘blockcutters’) and cleynstekers (‘carvers of fine architectural ornament’). Unfortunately, the data is incomplete, and Duverger had no list from the period when De Wayere was a member. Furthermore, none of the lists that Duverger transcribed include joiners.31 However, we know that

Harald Deceulaer, ‘Guilds and Litigation: Conflict Settlement in Antwerp (1585–1796)’, in Individual, Corporate, and Judicial Status in European Cities (Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period), ed. by Marc Boone and Maarten Prak (Leuven: Garant, 1996), pp. 171–208 (p. 196). 25 As a final option, the masons’ guild could have appealed to the Council of Brabant. For a flowchart tracing all the steps that might be taken by Antwerp guilds in such cases, see Deceulaer, ‘Guilds and Litigation’, pp. 171–208 (p. 176). There is no evidence that the masons’ guild appealed in this case. 26 Deceulaer, ‘Guilds and Litigation’, pp. 171–208 (pp. 182–83). 27 Peter Schneider, ‘Perfect Masters of Their Art: Re-imagining Expertise’, Journal of Architectural Education, 53:3 (2000), 141–45 (pp. 142, 145 n. 7). 28 Deceulaer, ‘Guilds and Litigation’, pp. 171–208 (p. 186). 29 Jan Steppe, Maurits Smeyers, and Jozef Lauwerys, Wereld van vroomheid en satire: Laat-gotische koorbanken in Vlaanderen (Kasterlee: De Vroente, 1973), p. 288. 30 Jozef Duverger, De Brusselsche Steenbickeleren: Beeldhouwers, Bouwmeesters, Metselaars enz. der xive en xve eeuw met een Aanhangsel over Klaas Sluter en zijn Brusselsche Medewerkers te Dijon (Ghent: A. Vyncke, 1933). 31 Duverger, De Brusselsche Steenbickeleren, pp. 13, 31–77. 24

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De Wayere was a scrynmakere (‘joiner’) from the accounts of 1509–10 and 1521–22 for work he produced for the Saint Eligius Confraternity in Brussels.32 Before starting the construction of the Saint Gertrude stalls, De Wayere paid a membership fee to the joiners’ guild in Leuven. Citizenship was normally required to join a guild in most European towns,33 but as mentioned above, exceptions could be negotiated. As De Wayere had trained as a joiner, and since he had been commissioned to make choir stalls, his decision to ally himself with the joiners’ guild was logical. Crucially for De Wayere, however, the joiners did not belong to the same guild as the carvers in Leuven. No extant documentation names the patron of the stalls, but it is all but certain that the set was commissioned by Saint Gertrude’s abbot, Pieter Was, who is depicted as an onlooker in the scene of the Resurrection of Christ (Figure  2). During his tenure as abbot, Was was responsible for much construction at the Augustinian abbey. He was also a frequent patron of the arts, commissioning a variety of works for other religious organizations in the area as well as for his own institution. Furthermore, as an educated theologian who would have been knowledgeable about the vitae of the patron saints of the abbey and its order, he is the most likely candidate to have designed the complex iconographical program of the stalls.34 Why he chose not to hire a local joiner is unknown, but a substantial proportion of commissions in Leuven were ordered from Brussels craftsmen or purchased in Brussels during the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries, particularly in the case of wooden altarpieces and wooden sculptural groups.35 The reason Abbot Was specifically chose De Wayere to make the stalls can be inferred from one of the few other documented works the craftsman made. In 1529 De Wayere, along with another joiner from Brussels, Kersten Swaluen, began constructing the choir stalls for the Premonstratensian abbey church in Tongerlo. Destroyed after the abbey was abolished under the French Republic,36 this set was described in 1790 by Canon Adrien Heylen, the archivist of Tongerlo Abbey, as richly ornamented with over 350 fine figures and copious leafwork.37 Two years before the Tongerlo choir stall contract was signed, Was had been named Abbot of Saint Gertrude. Since the Saint Gertrude and Tongerlo abbots were both representatives for the clergy in the States of Brabant, they would have been acquainted: Was presumably learned about De Wayere and his magnificent stalls through this Tongerlo colleague.38 Was may even have visited the Tongerlo stalls before commissioning the Saint Gertrude set. Although Abbot Was must have approved De Wayere’s finely crafted choir stalls when they were completed around the end of 1542, the elaborate carving, statues, and reliefs drew immediate disapproval from the Leuven metsers’ (‘masons’’) guild, which asserted that only their members had the right to make carved figures in the city. It might Ghislaine Derveaux-Van Ussel ‘Fragmenten van de Koorbanken van de Kerk van de voormalige Sint-Gertruiabdij te Leuven’, in Aspekten van de laatgotiek in Brabant: Tentoonstelling (Leuven: Stedelijk Musuem, 1971), pp. 373–76 (p. 373). 33 S. R. Epstein and Maarten Prak, ‘Introduction: Guilds, Innovation and the European Economy, 1400–1800’, in Guilds, Innovation and European Economy, 1400–1800, ed. by S. R. Epstein and Maarten Prak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 1–24 (p. 9). 34 Smeyers and Buyle, ‘De koorbanken’, pp. 41–60 (pp. 42, 47). 35 Maurits Smeyers, `De Brusselse inbreng te Leuven’, in Het Laatgotische Beeldsnijcentrum Leuven, ed. by Jan Crab and Maurits Smeyers (Leuven: Stedelijk Musuem, 1979), pp. 22–24 (p. 23). 36 Edward Van Even, Louvain dans le passé & dans le présent (Leuven: Auguste Fonteyn, 1895), p. 406. 37 ‘Deéze gestoelten, vercierd met meer dan 350 aerdige beélden, en oneyndig loofwerk’. Adrianus Heylen, Historische verhandeling over de Kempen (Turnhout: Brepols, 1790; repr. 1837), p. 159 n. cc. 38 Van Even, ‘Les Auteurs’, p. 60. 32

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Fig. 2: The Resurrection of Christ with Abbot Pieter Was looking on accompanied by his patron saint, Peter, south choir stalls, St Gertrude Abbey Church, Leuven. Photo: Ethan Matt Kavaler. Reproduced with the permission of the Parochie Sint- Geertrui, Leuven.

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seem strange that the masons’ guild filed a suit about the carving of wooden statues, but the Leuven masons’ guild included several different crafts. From the time of its incorporation in 1360, the guild had comprised four trades: metsers, steenhouwers (‘stone cutters’), kleinstekers (‘carvers of fine architectural ornament’), and beeldsnijders (‘figural carvers’).39 Furthermore, as the guild stated in the subsequent lawsuit, their members worked in wood as well as in stone. They therefore insisted that De Wayere pay the masons’ guild its annual membership fee of ten stuivers in addition to the payment he had made to the joiners’ guild.40 The earliest known document that relates to the Saint Gertrude case is dated 7 January 1542 (NS). It shows that the masons’ guild unsuccessfully attempted to extract payment from De Wayere before the lawsuit. The register from the Court of the Aldermen records that De Wayere was incarcerated in the city jail following the masons’ charge and was later freed on bail. He subsequently went home to Brussels with a promise to return to Leuven as soon as he was summoned for the trial. De Wayere also named a local representative on his behalf: Peeter Hermans, a joiner from the Saint Gertrude parish and a member of the joiners’ guild.41 Hermans had presumably worked on the stalls under De Wayere,42 and therefore would have known him and been familiar with how the set had been constructed. In any event, De Wayere did not return to Leuven when the trial took place two years later; Hermans had to represent him in court. He was accompanied by Joryss Moens, a member of the Leuven joiners’ guild jury. The masons’ guild was represented by three members of their own jury: Janne Waitraven, Dierick van Wolcxhem, and Janne Melaers. To support their suit, the masons referred explicitly to their guild rules, with their principal charge being taken from article XIV: it asserted that no one from within or outside Leuven was permitted to make architectural ornament or carved figures, in either wood or in stone, without first joining the masons’ guild.43 The masons did not accuse De Wayere himself of doing work outside his purview but rather objected to the fact that he had overseen buyten lieden (‘foreigners’) who had carved the figures on the stalls. These assistants are never identified, but since De Wayere had had a long career in Brussels, it seems most likely that they were Brussels craftsmen with whom he had previously worked. At the trial, the masons never distinguished between architectural ornament and figural carving on the stalls; instead, their accusation appears to have encompassed the whole range of carving found on the set (Figure 3). The question of jurisdiction shows how difficult demarcating areas of expertise could become when complex craftwork is considered. In theory, a joiner could fashion the seats and a carver could add the desired decorative and figural work. However, a careful examination of some works reveals that although some figural sculpture might have been carved independently and later integrated into a work of joinery, other elements could only have been made as a unit, either by an individual woodworker or through close collaboration between a sculptor and joiner. David Gropp’s study of the late fifteenth-century Ulm Crab, Beeldsnijcentrum Leuven, p. 37. ‘Sullen dat moegen doen, op kersghelt, te wetene thien stuyvers, die zy den ambachte ‘tjaers sullen moeten geven’, Van Even, ‘Les Auteurs’, p. 62. 41 Summarized from Leuven, Stadsarchief, Oud Archief, 7826, schepenregister 1541–42, fol. 235v in Smeyers and Buyle, ‘De koorbanken’, pp. 43, 57 n. 10. See n. 2 for information about the ongoing digitization project of the registers of the Court of Aldermen in Leuven. 42 Van Even, ‘Les Auteurs’, p. 61. 43 ‘Nyemandt, wie hy sy, van buyten noch van bynnen, en sal moegen verdingen werck van metselryden, van beel[d] snyden, van houte noch van steenen, hy en sal ‘t yerst en voer al int ambacht van den metsers zyn’. Van Even, ‘Les Auteurs’, p. 62. 39 40

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Fig. 3: South choir stalls, west half, St Gertrude Abbey Church, Leuven. Photo: author. Reproduced with the permission of the Parochie Sint-Geertrui, Leuven.

Minster choir stalls, for example, found that the carved busts in the canopy might have been made separately from the rest of the structure, but this could not have been the case for the stall end busts, which are structurally one with the stall ends.44 While this complexity is not addressed in the dispute between the two Leuven guilds, the permeability of the boundaries separating joiners’ from carvers’ work is acknowledged in contemporary documents. As mentioned above, there were various conventional lines of defence used in guild trials that the joiners might have taken against the masons’ accusations. Though some of these common strategies were not apposite for this case (presumably the joiners had no relevant privileges, for example), some potentially successful strategies were not used either. The joiners did not, for instance, adduce an earlier judgment in their favour from a similar lawsuit that took place in 1510. This oversight is surprising given the judge’s determination David Gropp, Das Ulmer Chorgestühl und Jörg Syrlin der Ältere: Untersuchung zu Architektur und Bildwerk (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1999), pp. 65–66.

44

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in that case, that ‘he who only carves or makes images, that one shall be bound to enter the guild of the bricklayers and that the joiners shall keep in their possession [the rights] to make all sorts of wood work’.45 Even if the joiners were unfamiliar with this particular judgment, it is curious that they did not use either of the main arguments from this successful defence. In the earlier case, the joiners drew attention to one of their guild statutes from 1433, which stated that only joiners and closely related professions (coopers, turners, and wheelwrights) were allowed to use glue, lathes, and compasses in the production of wooden objects.46 Although these regulations presumably still applied in 1544, neither Hermans nor Moens referred to any statutes or to the use of distinctive joiners’ tools or materials in the construction of the choir stall figural carving and architectural ornament. The joiners of 1510 had further strengthened their ultimately successful defence by appealing to precedent. They contended that for decades Leuven joiners had been making many kinds of wooden objects that included figural carving and architectural ornament, examples of which could be seen in a variety of places throughout the city. They listed several types of these objects and named several specific examples such as the Franciscans’ jube, which included figural carving.47 In contrast, in the 1544 trial the joiners made no reference whatsoever to precedent. Instead, they focused on the status of the beel[d]snyden under dispute and, interestingly, they never addressed the charge that they were prohibited from carving metselryden as well. This term, a variant of metselrie, had three main definitions in this period: metselwerk (‘masonry’), nis (‘niche’) and beeldwerk […] in den zin van bouwkundige ornamenten (‘sculpture in the sense of architectural ornament’).48 In the context of the lawsuit, the intended meaning of metselryden becomes clearer. Given the presence of lavish architectural ornament on the stalls (Figure 4) and the fact that architectural carvers were part of the masons’ guild, it seems that the masons were referring to the elaborate carved ornament that frames the figural sculpture. Even the masons themselves did not mention architectural ornament a second time, perhaps believing that the independent status of the statues and figural reliefs would be easier to establish. In his argument, Peeter Hermans (De Wayere’s representative) maintained that, in contrast to the joiners (who were allowed to make all sorts of works out of wood), the masons’ only concern was with carved figural images and their claim did not apply when ‘De ghene die alleene beelde snyden oft maken dat die gehouden zullen zyn int ambacht vande metsers te comen ende dat de scrynmakers bliven zullen in huere possessie van alrehande wercke van houte te make’. Cited and translated in Jacobs, Early Netherlandish, p. 211. Jacobs translates metsers as ‘bricklayers’, whereas I have chosen to translate it as ‘masons’. Since the metsers are in a guild with what seem to be related crafts (stone cutters and carvers), I believe it is more likely that they were working with stone than with brick. 46 ‘Dair op ende tegen de voirscreven verwerde en seyden inden yersten dat zy begerden gevisiteert te hebbene de auctentycke rolle dairinne men bevinden soude in eener ordonantie oft statuyt byde voirscreven stadt den voirscreven scrynmakersambachte verleent int jair van XIIIIcXXXIII dat tvoirscreven scrynmakersambacht metten cuypers, drayers ende raymakersambachte alleenlyck toebehoirt te moegen maken gelympt werck, passerwerck ende draeybancken setten’. The complete document is transcribed from Stadsarchief Leuven, no. 7403, fols 510–11 as Bijlage 11 in Crab, Beeldsnijcentrum Leuven, pp. 313–14. 47 ‘Seggende voirts dat zy over X, XX, XXX jaeren ende daigen boven ende beneden XXX jaeren ende daigen gewrocht hadden als scrynmakers in kercken, in poirterhuysen ende in alle plaetsen dair zy des versocht waeren, alrehande gesneden ende metselriewercke van houte als beelden, pyleren, tabernaculen ende andersints; seggende voirts dat de scrynmakers van Loevenen onder andere stucken alhier bynnen dese stadt van Loevene gemaict hadden docsael te Minderbruederen, metten beelden’. Crab, Beeldsnijcentrum Leuven, p. 313. 48 The last meaning could be used in reference to goldwork and painting as well as to carving. De Geïntegreerde Taal-Bank: Historische woordenboeken op internet (Leiden: Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie, 2007–10) http://gtb.inl.nl/iWDB/ search?actie=article&wdb=MNW&id=29490&lemma=metselrie [accessed 14 January 2014]. 45

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Fig. 4: The Adoration of the Magi, north choir stalls, St Gertrude Abbey Church, Leuven. Photo: author. Reproduced with the permission of the Parochie Sint- Geertrui, Leuven.

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these images adorned a larger structure as ornament.49 The masons’ juror, Janne Melaers, objected, stating that De Wayere and his workers had indeed carved such figures.50 Hermans’s distinction was then restated more clearly by the Leuven juror, Joryss Moens, who insisted that the choir stall carvings were not made as independent sculpture. Rather, he asserted, the carving was integral to the work as ornament and could not be considered separate from the entire creation.51 Although it is difficult to be certain from the laconic judicial account, Hermans and Moens do not seem to have used the word cyrate ­(‘ornament’) in a theoretical way: no authority is quoted, nor is a precise definition given. Despite their focus on the status of carving, they do not make any appeal to art treatises that were circulating in the Low Countries at this time, although defendants in c­ ontemporary lawsuits occasionally did so.52 Ornament is simply contrasted with figural carving that was intended as independent work. In the end, Moens’s argument convinced the Aldermen that the sculpture on the choir stalls had a different status from that of the independent sculpture that fell under the masons’ jurisdiction. Mathys de Wayere, therefore, was not obligated to join the masons’ guild. There may of course have been undocumented factors that affected the outcome of the court case. Perhaps Abbot Was, who is never mentioned in the lawsuit, intervened behind the scenes: as a representative for the States of Brabant and a major patron in the larger community, Was held considerable power. Or perhaps the relatively weak position of the masons’ guild, which had been troubled with financial difficulties for several decades,53 lessened its stature. Whatever outside factors might have influenced the decision, however, the terms of the lawsuit are clear. Still in situ in the abbey church, the Saint Gertrude choir stalls, though much damaged and modified, make it easier to appreciate the joiners’ argument that the carving should qualify as ornament. Our present-day, Western understanding of sculpture, however, derives in part from ideas we have inherited through subsequent developments in collecting and museum display. Most sixteenth-century wood carvings encountered in museums are presented as freestanding sculpture despite the fact that the majority were not designed as independent works. Rather, most were originally part of altarpieces and other church furnishings that were subsequently dismembered.54 This practice continues today: when some of the small figures that were stolen from the niches of the Saint Gertrude stalls were recovered, they were not put back, but were displayed instead in the city museum in Leuven.55 As art and art history focused more and more narrowly on easel painting and ‘Mathys  […] ware int scrynma’ckeren ambachte, dien geoirlooft was sulcken werck doer hen en hueren dieneren te wercken, van alderande wercke van houte te maken, en dat den metsers alleen aengaende waren vanden gheenen die alleenen beelden snyden ofte maken, en nyet als de beelden werdden gemaict int werck en als cyraten vanden wercke’. Van Even, ‘Les Auteurs’, pp. 62–63. 50 ‘Den voirsc. geswoirenen vanden metsers ambachte, doir Janne Melaers, seggende ter contrarien, gemerct de selve Mathys van yerst was van hen gecalengeert, en bevonden dat hy de beelden dede maken buyten lieden, die op hen selven snyden’. Van Even, ‘Les Auteurs’, p. 63. 51 ‘Te meer want men nyet bevynden en sonde [sic] eenige beelden a part gemaict te wesen, maer waren int werck gemaect als cyrate vanden selven wesende’. Van Even, ‘Les Auteurs’, p. 63. 52 For example, the carpenter and brick mason Willem van Noort defended himself in a 1542 guild dispute in Utrecht by quoting from works by Vitruvius and Leon Battista Alberti. For a discussion of the case, see Schneider, ‘Perfect Masters’, pp. 141–45. 53 Crab, Beeldsnijcentrum Leuven, p. 39. 54 See, for example, the catalogue of Netherlandish sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum by Paul Williamson, Netherlandish Sculpture, 1450–1550 (London: V & A Publications, 2002). 55 Smeyers and Buyle, ‘De koorbanken’, p. 54. Note the two empty niches in Figure 3. 49

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freestanding sculpture, the components of composite objects often acquired greater value once they were removed from their original setting. Furthermore, as this ecclesiastical furniture was deemed obsolete due to changes in religious practice, multipartite altarpieces were cut up into individual paintings; manuscripts suffered their full-page illuminations removed and framed as independent miniatures; and three-dimensional wooden figures were sawn off larger structures and displayed independently. This type of repurposing gained momentum in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the secularization of churches in many European countries made church furnishings available to collectors.56 Although greed and even theft led to much of this dismemberment,57 many pieces survive only because they were viewed as valuable sculpture on otherwise condemned artefacts. When the choir stalls from the Fugger Chapel in Augsburg were scheduled for destruction in 1832,58 for instance, the sixteen wooden busts that were part of the set were first ­detached and sold off.59 In part, the Leuven dispute of 1544 was about institutional boundaries and work protection for guild members. These members paid their fees to ensure that foreign workers and rival guilds did not encroach on commissions that were essential to their livelihood. As we have seen, however, the complex nature of objects like choir stalls fell under the umbrella of various specialists, each of whom wanted to stake out his territory: to the beeldsnijder, the act of figural carving was most salient; to the joiner, the materials of wood and glue defined the work. In places where these craftsmen were not members of the same guild, conflicts were inevitable, and quarrels might be resolved in a variety of ways. But an important part of the Leuven dispute was about the evolving status of the carved figure in the early modern period. Independent small-scale sculpture had been established as a separate genre in the Low Countries, but its boundaries were still being debated by guilds in ways that conservational and museological practices of the nineteenth-century have effaced. No matter where the line is drawn, however, the carving on choir stalls differs from freestanding sculpture in numerous important ways. The Leuven dispute reminds us that we must interrogate the inherited traditions of Western collecting and museum presentation, and think carefully about how wooden sculpture, whether made by a joiner or a beeldsnijder, was conceived, constructed, and intended to be viewed.

Charles Tracy, Continental Church Furniture in England: A Traffic in Piety (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2001), pp. 39–42. 57 For example, one night in March 1839, while the choir was unlocked so that preparations could be made for the funeral of Monseigneur de Gallien de Chabons, a former bishop of Amiens, more than forty statuettes were stolen from the Amiens choir stalls. Although the theft was reported the next day, no trace was ever found of these carvings. Georges Durand, Monographie de l’église de Notre-Dame cathédrale d’Amiens: II. Mobilier et accessoires, 3 vols (Paris: A. Picard, 1903), ii, p. 156. 58 Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 296. 59 Today, three surviving busts are in the Bode-Museum in Berlin and a fourth is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. 56

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Tales of the City The Image of the Netherlandish Artist in the Sixteenth Century Krista De Jonge KU Leuven

In the early modern Low Countries, the urban milieu played a decisive role in the formation of the image of the artist, when ‘artist’ is understood as an independent intellectual or master of the liberal arts, rather than as a practitioner of a manual skill.1 The Antwerp artistic and literary vanguard in particular helped position the Netherlandish artist on the international stage even before the revised, second edition of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists came out in 1568. As is well known, this version incorporated the critical comments sent to Vasari by well-informed and learned connoisseurs such as Domenicus Lampsonius in order to help him achieve a more balanced view on artistic achievement in the North.2 A crucial part of the revision can be attributed to the celebrated and influential Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, altrimenti detti Germania inferiore (1567), written by the Florence-born merchant Lodovico Guicciardini.3 In this essay, I will discuss Guicciardini’s perspective on Netherlandish art in the urban context of his time (Figure 1).

Hessel Miedema, ‘Over de waardering van architekt en beeldende kunstenaar in de zestiende eeuw’, Oud Holland, 94  (1980), 71–84; Envisioning the Artist in the Early Modern Netherlands: Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, 59 (2009–10), ed. by H. Perry Chapman and Joanna Woodall (Zwolle: Waanders, 2010). 2 Giorgio Vasari, ‘Di diversi artefici fiamminghi’, in Le vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols (Florence: Sansoni, 1878–85), vii (1881), pp. 579–92. On the Vasari-Lampson correspondence, see Jean Puraye and Marie Delcourt, Dominique Lampson, humaniste 1532–1599 (n.p. [Bruges?]: Desclée De Brouwer, 1950), pp. 70–72, 83–89. Critical notes in Wim Sosef, ‘Filiazone o parallelismo? Il rapporto fra le Vite vasariane e la Descrittione guicciardiniana’, in Lodovico Guicciardini (1521–1589). Actes du colloque international des 28, 29 et 30 mars 1990, ed. by Pierre Jodogne: Travaux de l’Institut Interuniversitaire pour l’étude de la Renaissance et de l’Humanisme, 10 (Leuven: Peeters, 1991), pp. 337–48 (pp. 338–42). 3 Lodovico Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, altrimenti detti Germania inferiore (Antwerp: Guilielmus Silvius, 1567), pp. 97–101. I have also used the augmented Italian edition: Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, altrimenti detti Germania inferiore (Antwerp: Christofano Plantino, 1581), pp. 141–47. See Appendix 1. Royal Library of Belgium, inv. VH 25.745 C LP and VH 25.747 C LP, respectively. All copies are from the celebrated library of the early nineteenth-century collector Charles Van Hulthem. On the connection between Silvius and Plantin, see Paul Valkema Blouw, ‘Willem Silvius’ remarkable start, 1559–62’, Quaerendo, 20 (1990), 167–206. 1

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 113-129. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114004

Fig. 1: Title page, Lodovico Guicciardini, Description de touts les Pais-Bas, (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1582).

Krista De Jonge

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Presenting Netherlandish Art Guicciardini paints an interesting image of the artists linked with the Antwerp milieu — and, by extension, with the Low Countries. A short passage describing the three Confrerie dette di Rettorica (‘Confraternities of Rhetoric’) or Rederijkerskamers, namely chambers of rhetoric, ‘which serve to entertain and and to feast the people from time to time in their public rooms with comedies, tragedies, and other histories, and civil and moral delights’, segues quite naturally into a dissertation on Netherlandish art by way of the chamber De Violieren, whose members, according to Guicciardini, were almost all painters who clearly demonstrated their ‘acuity of wit, and ingenuity’ in all their works.4 The art of painting, says Guicciardini, is not only much present in Antwerp and in Mechelen, where there is also a painters’ guild, but is also an important art in the whole country: And I say first that in these regions alone, there are more painters of every kind, and profession, than in many other Provinces all together; and since their number is great, and their expertise high, there are and have been many masters of great art and invention.5

The list of ‘great, inventive masters’ that follows starts with Jan van Eyck and the invention of oil painting, a story taken from the first edition of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550),6 and includes luminaries of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Netherlandish painting such as Hieronymus Bosch, Jan Gossaert (‘the first to bring from Italy the art of painting Histories, and Poesie with nude figures’),7 Barend van Orley, and Pieter Coecke van Aelst, great painter and great inventor of tapestry designs, to whom must be given the honour of bringing from Italy the mastery of architecture, having also translated the excellent work of Sebastiano Serlio of Bologna in this Teutonic language, thus rendering a great service to the country.8 4 Guicciardini, Descrittione (1567), p. 97 (see the original text in the appendix). This can be seen as an indirect reference to the famous 1561 Landjuweel or competition among the Brabantine chambers of rhetoric, organized by the chamber De Violieren. Elly Cockx-Indestege and others, Uyt Ionsten Versaemt. Het landjuweel van 1561 te Antwerpen (Brussels: Koninklijke Bibliotheek of Belgium, 1994); and Jeroen Vandommele, Als in een spiegel. Vrede, kennis en gemeenschap op het Antwerpse Landjuweel van 1561 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2011). Painters and other artists were indeed well represented in the chambers of Brussels, Mechelen, Leuven, and Antwerp. The Antwerp Violieren, for instance, had been founded within the Guild of Saint Luke in 1478, while tapestry makers and dealers played an important role in the Brussels Corenbloem in the second half of the sixteenth century. See Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Om beters wille. Rederijkerskamers en de stedelijke cultuur in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (1400–1650) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), pp.  78, 122–27; and Yvette Bruijnen, ‘De relatie tussen rederijkers en schilders te Leuven in de zestiende eeuw’, in Conformisten en rebellen. Rederijkerscultuur in de Nederlanden (1400–1650), ed. by Bart Ramakers (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 247–59. 5 ‘Et prima dico che in queste Regioni sole, sono piu dipintori d’ogni specia, & professione, che non sono in molte altre Provincie insieme: & si come il numero è grande, & grande l’esercitio, cosi ci sono & sono stati molti gran’maestri d’arte & d’inventione’ (all in-text English translations are mine). Guicciardini, Descrittione (1567), p. 97. 6 Claude Sorgeloos, ‘Les Sources imprimées de la “Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi”’, in Lodovico Guicciardini (1521– 1589), ed. by Jodoigne, pp. 37–98 (pp. 66–78). 7 ‘Giovanni di Mabuge, il quale fu il primo che portò d’Italia in questi Paesi, l’arte del dipingere Historie, & poesie con figure nude’. Guicciardini, Descrittione (1567), p. 98. See Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance, The Complete Works, ed. by Maryan Ainsworth (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010). 8 ‘Pietro Couck d’Alost, gran’ pittore & grande inventore di patroni da Tapezzerie, a cui si da laude d’haver’ portato d’Italia, la maestra dell’architettura, traducendo inoltre l’egregia opera di Sebastiano Serlio Bolognese in questa lingua Teutonica, che dicono haver’ fatto gran’ servigio al paese’. Guicciardini, Descrittione (1567), p.  98. See Krista De Jonge, ‘Standardizing “Antique” Architecture, 1539–1543’, in Unity and Discontinuity: Architectural Relations between the Southern and Northern Low Countries 1530–1700, ed. by De Jonge and Konrad Ottenheym: Architectura Moderna, 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 41–53.

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Closer to Guicciardini’s own time — and still alive at the time of his writing — were Frans Floris (who merits a long laudatio), Anthonis Mor of Utrecht (painter to King Philip II), Lambert Lombard, and Pieter Brueghel, as well as female painters such as Susanna Horembout and Marie Bessemers, Coecke’s first wife. Similarly, in architecture and sculpture there were masters of note such as Sebastiaan van Noyen of Utrecht (military architect to Charles V and Philip II who designed the new frontier fortifications), Lucas van Leyden (copper engraver), Jacques Du Broeucq (who designed the palaces of regent Mary of Hungary), Giambologna (Du Broeucq’s disciple), and both Cornelis II Floris and Willem van den Broecke (renowned sculptors). Cornelis Floris is credited with being the first ‘to bring from Italy to this country the art of portraying grotesques in a natural manner’.9 Guicciardini’s next, rather sweeping statement places these figures at the hub of an international network of exchange. The Netherlandish artists, ‘almost every man of them’, had gone to Italy to learn, to see antique things, and to see the great masters of their art. Well-travelled, they were internationally known and renowned for their artistic and ­technical prowess. They contributed significantly to the glory of Belgica abroad: The aforementioned painters, architects, and sculptors have almost all been to Italy, some to learn, some to see antique things, and know the most excellent men of their profession, and some to seek adventure, and make themselves known; once their aim was fulfilled, they returned more often than not to their homeland with experience, facility [in the exercise of their art], and with honour. And furthermore from here master artists have spread out all over England and Germany, and especially to Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Poland, and other northern countries, going as far as Moscow, without mentioning those who went to France, Spain, and Portugal, most of them enticed there by rich rewards of princes, republics, and other potentates, which is no less wonderful than it is honourable.10

The second half of this statement is amply borne out by contemporary sources, but the first is not, contrary to what is generally assumed in current surveys. The mobility of Netherlandish artists was indeed much above the European average even before the beginning of the Revolt of the Low Countries. Only in a few cases, however — such as that of Lambert Lombard — is there hard evidence of an Italian sojourn.11 Nevertheless, both aspects — success abroad on the one hand and direct experience of Italian art and Roman ‘Cornelio Floris: fratello di Francesco Floris, è architettore & scultor’ grande, huomo molto diligente & servitiale, a cui s’attribuisce l’honore d’esser stato il primo, che portasse d’Italia in questi paesi l’arte del contrafare le grottesche al naturale’. Guicciardini, Descrittione (1567), p. 101. On Cornelis Floris, see Antoinette Huysmans and others, Cornelis Floris 1514–1575 beeldhouwer architect ontwerper (Brussels: Gemeentekrediet, 1996). 10 ‘I quali dipintori, Architettori, & Scultori mentionati sono stati quasi tutti in Italia, chi per imparare, chi per vedere cose antiche, & conoscere gli huomini eccellenti della loro professione, & chi per cercar’ ventura, & farsi conoscere, onde adempiuto il desiderio loro, ritornano il piu delle volte alla patria con esperienza, con facultà, & con honore: Et di qui poi si spargono maestri per l’Inghilterra, per tutta l’Alamagna, & specialmente per la Danimarca, per la Suetia, per la Norvegia, per la Pollonia, & per altri paese Settentrionali, infino per la Moscovia, senza parlare di quelli che vanno per la Francia, per la Spagna & per il Portogallo il piu delle volte chiamati con gran’ provvisione da Principi, da Republiche, & da altri Potentati, cosa non meno maravigliosa che honorata’. Guicciardini, Descrittione (1567), p. 101. 11 In general, see The Low Countries at the Crossroads, ed. by Ottenheym and Krista De Jonge: Architectura Moderna, 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). On Lambert Lombard in Italy, see Godelieve Denhaene, Lambert Lombard. Renaissance et humanisme à Liège (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1990), pp. 15–19. 9

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antiquity on the other — are an integral part of the self-fashioning Guicciardini borrowed directly from the artists he knew in Antwerp, such as Jacques Du Broeucq, who served on the jury for the competition of the new town hall in 1560, or Cornelis and Frans Floris, who were residents of the city.12 His 1567 overview of the arts in the Low Countries is chiefly based on his own diligent information gathering in the local artistic community.13 Networking in Antwerp Guicciardini was indeed a privileged witness to the Antwerp mercantile milieu in general and to the artistic vanguard in particular.14 He was the nephew of the betterknown historian Francesco Guicciardini, who was ambassador of Pope Leo  X and Pope Clement VII, and counsellor to Cosimo I de’ Medici until he fell out of favour. Lodovico had followed his older brother Giovan Battista to Antwerp, where he arrived in 1541, never to leave again. After a fairly successful though somewhat tumultuous career as a merchant, he reinvented himself as an author. By that time, he had become fully integrated into the multicultural milieu of the Antwerp merchant class.15 Guicciardini had originally conceived his Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi as a description of Antwerp, to ‘prove his attachment to [the city]’, as he put it in his address to the Antwerp town magistrate of 20 October 1566. He soon decided to expand the text, however, to include a description of the whole of the Low Countries belonging to the King of Spain, to whom the work ultimately is dedicated, ‘in the hope of pleasing you and to provide others with useful information’.16 His Descrittione is the first text to explain clearly and accurately the political structure and customs of the Low Countries, and it consequently established a model for descriptions of Netherlandish cities. His long involvement in Antwerp’s trade gave him an insider’s view on the city, as becomes obvious when comparing the tone of his description with that of contemporary travel reports.17 Guicciardini’s image of Antwerp adheres to its official imago urbis. The chief notes he struck, for instance, had already appeared in nucleo in the Latin address to the viewer written by Du Broeucq’s possible experience in Italy is discussed in De Jonge, ‘A Model Court Architect’, in Unity and Discontinuity, ed. by De Jonge and others, pp. 79–86 (p. 80). For his involvement in the 1560 competition, see August Corbet, ‘Cornelis Floris en de bouw van het stadhuis van Antwerpen’, Belgisch tijdschrift voor oudheidkunde en kunstgeschiedenis/Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art, 6 (1936), 223–64 (pp. 232–33). 13 Sorgeloos, ‘Les Sources’, p. 48. The second edition (1581) was, according to Sorgeloos, influenced by the 1568 edition of Vasari’s Vite, but my own word-by-word comparison of both versions has shown this to be untrue. The two additions — a brief mention of Jan van Scorel’s architectural activity on p. 143 and the insertion of Lucas de Heere, painter and poet, on p. 146 — cannot be due to Vasari. Jacques M. Maldague, ‘La Part de Guicciardini dans la littérature artistique de son temps’, in Lodovico Guicciardini (1521–1589), ed. by Jodoigne, pp. 321–35, justly stresses Guicciardini’s independence from contemporary sources. 14 Guicciardini’s image of Antwerp has been treated extensively in De Jonge, ‘A Tale of Two Cities: The Image of Brussels and of Antwerp in Lodovico Guicciardini’s Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi’, in Tales of the City: Outsiders’ Descriptions of Cities in the Early Modern Period, ed. by Flaminia Bardati and others (= Città e storia, 7 (2012)), 135–57. See also C. Joachim Classen, ‘Lodovico Guicciardini’s Descrittione and the Tradition of the laudes and descriptiones urbium’, in Lodovico Guicciardini (1521–1589), ed. by Jodoigne, 99–117. 15 Dina Aristodemo, ‘La figura e l’opera di Lodovico Guicciardini’, in Lodovico Guicciardini (1521–1589), ed.  by Jodoigne, 19–36. 16 The chapter on Antwerp is the only one provided with a particular address and far surpasses the others in length. Guicciardini, Descrittione (1567), p. 61 (wrongly numbered); and Guicciardini, De idyllische Nederlanden. Antwerpen en de Nederlanden in de 16de eeuw, trans. and ed. by Monique Jacqmain (Antwerp: De Vries Brouwers, 1987), p. 14. 17 Overview in Anne-Marie Van Passen, ‘Antwerpen goed bekeken. Een bloemlezing’, in Antwerpen, verhaal van een metropool 16de–17de eeuw, ed. by Jan Van der Stock (Ghent: Snoeck-Ducaju, 1993), pp. 59–67. 12

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learned town clerk Cornelius Scribonius Grapheus (alias De Schrijver) for the city map by Virgilius Bononiensis (printed by Gillis Coppens, alias Aegidius van Diest, in 1565).18 Grapheus, who died in 1558 but must have been known to Guicciardini because of his public position, was the hub of the artistic and intellectual vanguard in mid-sixteenth-century Antwerp. He was actively involved with many of the artists cited by the Florentine, above all those who contributed to the decorations of the joyous entry of Charles  V and Philip of Spain into Antwerp in 1549. Among these were such painters as Frans Floris, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, and Hans Vredeman de Vries.19 Some of these artistic innovators were actively helped by Grapheus. For instance, he sponsored Pieter Coecke van Aelst while the painter was preparing the costly translations of Sebastiano Serlio’s Fourth Book; indeed, it seems that Grapheus was instrumental in getting Coecke a rent subsidy from the city in 1542–43, when the painter was preparing the French and German editions of the treatise.20 It was most probably Grapheus who introduced Coecke to the subject of Vitruvian studies, and he who contributed the introductory poem to the first, Flemish translation of Serlio’s Fourth Book, the Generale Reglen, in 1539.21 In another instance, Grapheus is quoted in correspondence between Cornelis Floris and Joos Facuez, secretary to the chancellor in the years 1553–54, concerning Cornelis Floris’s Merode tomb at Geel. The letter mentions that Grapheus knows ‘die antixze maniere van de Romaijnen’ (‘the antique manner [of lettering] of the Romans’) very well and thus might be of help to Floris in the matter.22 This enormous, coloured woodcut — composed of twenty sheets measuring together 1200 × 2650 mm (approximately 47 ¼ × 103 ⅓ inches) — survives in a single copy in the Antwerp Museum Plantin-Moretus. Leon Voet and others, De stad Antwerpen van de Romeinse tijd tot de 17de eeuw. Topografische studie rond het plan van Virgilius Bononiensis 1565 (Brussels: Gemeentekrediet, 1978), pp.  133–46. The map illustrating the chapter on Antwerp in Guicciardini, Descrittione (1567), between pp. 60–61, seems to reference the same sources — among others the bird’s eye views published by Hieronymus Cock and others in the late 1550s. Pieter Martens, ‘Bird’s Eye View of Antwerp from the East’, in Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print, ed. by Joris Van Grieken and others (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 72–73 (cat. no. 1). 19 Irmgard von Roeder-Baumbach, Versieringen bij Blijde Inkomsten gebruikt in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden gedurende de 16e en 17e eeuw (Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1943), pp. 12–14; August Corbet, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Maerlandtbibliotheek, 21 (Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1950), pp. 31–45; Edmond J. Roobaert, ‘De Seer Wonderlycke Schoone Triumphelycke Incompst van den Hooghmogenden Prince Philips […] in de Stadt Antwerpen […] Anno 1549’, Bulletin van de Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, 9 (1960), 37–74; Sune Schéle, Cornelis Bos: A Study of the Origins of the Netherland Grotesque (Stockholm: Almqvist och Wiksell, 1965), pp. 43, 54–59, 74–76; Georges Marlier, La Renaissance flamande. Pierre Coeck d’Alost (Brussels: Finck, 1966), pp.  386–90; Wouter Kuyper, The Triumphant Entry of Renaissance Architecture in The Netherlands: The Joyeuse Entrée of Philip of Spain into Antwerp in 1549, Renaissance and Mannerist Architecture in the Low Countries from 1530 to 1630, 2 vols (Alphen aan den Rijn: Canaletto, 1994), i, pp. 7–78; Mark A. Meadow, ‘Ritual and Civic Identity in Philip II’s 1549 Antwerp “Blijde Incompst”’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 49 (1998), 37–67; Jochen Becker, ‘“Greater than Zeuxis and Apelles”: Artists as Arguments in the Antwerp Entry of 1549’, in Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance, ed. by J. R. Mulryne and Elizabeth Goldring (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 171–95; and Stijn Bussels, Spectacle, Rhetoric and Power: The Triumphal Entry of Prince Philip of Spain into Antwerp (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012). 20 Van der Stock, ‘Fluiten in het donker’, De Gulden Passer, 76–77 (1998–99), 361–69 (p. 365). 21 Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Generale Reglen der Architecturen op de vyve manieren van edificien, te weten, thuscana dorica, ionica, corinthia ende composita, met den exemplen der antiquiteiten die int meeste deel concorderen met de leerinhge van Vitruvio (Antwerp: Gillis Coppens van Diest, 1539); Van Aelst, Reigles generales de l’architecture, sur les cincq manieres d’edifices, ascavoir, thuscane, doricq[ue], ionicq[ue], corinthe & co[m]posite, avec les exemples dantiquitez, selon la doctrine de Vitruve (Antwerp: Gillis Coppens van Diest, 1542); and Van Aelst, Die gemaynen reglen von der Architectur uber die funf manieren der Gebeu, zu wissen, thoscana, dorica, ionica, corintia, und composite […] (Antwerp: Gillis Coppens van Diest, 1542 [1543 NS]). 22 ‘Cornelis Grapheus die dagelyxs anders niet en doet dan epitafiums te ordineren, hij weet die antixze maniere van de Romaijnen, hij maeckt zijn werkck daer af ’. The passage refers to the epitaph inscription. A. Cosemans, ‘Correspondentie van Cornelis Floris betreffende het Merode-praalgraf te Geel’, Belgisch tijdschrift voor oudheidkunde en kunstgeschiedenis/Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art, 5 (1935), 251–61 (p. 260, doc. no. 11). 18

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Grapheus was also the author of the celebrated report on the 1549 joyous entry, which was published a year later by the aforementioned Gillis Coppens in three languages — Dutch, French, and Latin — and illustrated with images of the lavish decorations by Pieter Coecke.23 Guicciardini had freely adapted this report,24 as had the author of the most extensive chronicle of Crown Prince Philip’s travels between 1548 and 1551, Juan Cristoval Calvete de Estrella, whose Felicíssimo viaje appeared in Antwerp from Martin Nucio’s press in 1552.25 Grapheus and Calvete de Estrella knew each other quite well during the latter’s years in the Low Countries (until 1556), and both had a stake in presenting Antwerp and its accomplishments in a favourable light.26 For his contribution to the imago urbis, Calvete received a donation of fifty gold crowns on 8 October 1549, whereas Guicciardini received a regular wage and, on the presentation of the lavish 1581 Plantin edition to the city magistrate, a gift of 200 pounds artois, to be repeated again later.27 The complex ties linking these chroniclers of Antwerp’s artistic glory might be illustrated by the case of the triumphal arch of the Genoese in 1549, which had been especially appreciated by Charles  V. The poet and humanist Stefano Ambrogio Schiappalaria, a noted member of the Genoese merchant colony in Antwerp who had invented the arch’s learned programme, had had the honour of explaining it to the emperor in person on the day after the entry; this disquisition received pride of place in the Felicíssimo viaje and even merited an illustration.28 The illustration by Coecke in Grapheus’s report, on the other hand, showcased the paintings by Frans Floris.29 Finally, Schiappalaria was also known to Guicciardini, as he contributed to the set of dedicatory poems in the beginning of the 1567 and 1581 editions of the Descrittione. These liminary poems testify to Guicciardini’s excellent connections with the intellectual elite of the city — and indeed of the country — during the 1550s and 1560s. There are contributions, among others, by Alexander Grapheus, son of Cornelis Grapheus; Cornelis Grapheus and Van Aelst, De seer wonderlijcke/ schoone/ Triumphelijcke Incompst, van den hooghmogenden Prince Philips, Prince van Spaignien, Caroli de vijfden, keyserssone. In de stadt van Antwerpen, Anno, M.LLLLL,XLJX (Antwerp: Gillis Coppens van Diest, 1550); Grapheus and Van Aelst, La tresadmirable, tresmagnifique, & triumphante entrée, du treshault & trespuissant Prince Philipes, Prince d’Espaignes, filz de Lempereur Charles. v e., ensemble la vraye description des Spectacles, theatres, archz triumphaulx. & c.  les quelz ont este faictz & bastis a sa tres desiree reception en la tres renommee florissante ville d’Anvers. Anno 1549 (Antwerp: Gillis Coppens van Diest, 1550); and Grapheus and Van Aelst, Spectaculorum in susceptione Philippi, Hisp. Princ., divi Caroli V, Caes., f., an. 1549, Antverpiae, aditorum, mirificus apparatus […] (Antwerp: Gillis Coppens van Diest, 1550). Floris Prims, ‘Het eigen werk van Cornelis Grapheus (1482–1558). I. II.’, in Antwerpiensia. Losse bijdragen tot de Antwerpsche geschiedenis, ed. by Prims (Antwerp: De Vlijt, 1938), pp. 172–90; and John Landwehr, Splendid Ceremonies: State Entries and Royal Funerals in the Low Countries, 1515–1791, A Bibliography (Nieuwkoop: Hes & de Graaf, 1971), pp. 67–68, 70, 73–75. See also n. 22. 24 Guicciardini, Descrittione (1567), pp. 84–88; and Guicciardini, Descrittione (1581), pp. 128–30. 25 Edmond J. Roobaert, ‘Nieuwe gegevens over Calvete de Estrella en L. Giucciardini uit de rekeningen van de Antwerpse magistraat’, Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis, 41: 2–3 (1958), 68–94 (pp. 71–78); and José Luis Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero, ‘Juan Cristóbal Calvete de Estrella (c. 1510–1593)’, in El felicíssimo viaje del muy alto y muy poderoso Príncipe don Phelippe, ed. by Paloma Cuenca and others (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoración de los Centenarios de Felipe II y Carlos V, 2001), xvii–l (p. xxx). 26 Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero, ‘Juan Cristóbal’, pp. xxx–xxxi, xxxv–xxxvii. 27 Roobaert, ‘Nieuwe gegevens’, pp. 75–76, 84–86, 87–92. 28 William Eisler, ‘Celestial Harmonies and Hapsburg Rule: Levels of Meaning in a Triumphal Arch for Philip II in Antwerp, 1549’, in ‘All the world’s a stage  […]’. Art and Pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque, Part 1: Triumphal Celebrations and the Rituals of Statecraft, 2 vols, ed. by Barbara Wisch and Susan Scott Munshower: Papers in Art History from The Pennsylvania State University, vi (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), pp. 332–56. 29 Carl Van de Velde, Frans Floris (1519/20–1570). Leven en werken, Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Klasse der Schone Kunsten, 37, no.  30, 2  vols (Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, 1975), i, pp. 159– 85; and Wouk, ‘“Uno stupore ed una maraviglia”: The Prints of Frans Floris de Vriendt (1519/20–70)’, in The New Hollstein. Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts 1450–1700, Frans Floris, ed. by Ger Luijten (Ouderkerk aan den IJssel: Sound & Vision, 2011), xxxiii–civ (pp. xlvii–xlix). 23

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Theodore de Bry, the engraver and printer from Liège; the Latin poet Johannes Latomus; and Gaspar Schetz, Lord of Grobbendonk, a well-known numismatist. Moreover, quotations in the text and in his other literary work show that he was linked with the extended network of studiosi of antiquity around Abraham Ortelius: Jean Vivien or Vivianus, a merchant and antiquarian known for having accompanied Ortelius and Justus Lipsius on a quest for Roman antiquities from ancient Gaul in 1574;30 Goropius Becanus, the historian and linguist who argued for the antiquity of the Netherlandish language; Hubert Goltzius, the antiquarian artist; Marcus Laurinus, the collector of antiquities whose library Guicciardini must have visited in Bruges. Many others are cited by name, though Guicciardini himself does not appear in Ortelius’s famous Liber amicorum.31 Guicciardini must have approved the inclusion of the map of Emperor Claudius’s famous base camp on the Dutch shores — from which he prepared the invasion of Britain — that appears in the 1581 Plantin edition. From 1562 onwards, Ortelius, Guido Laurinus, and Goltzius had studied the archaeological remains of the camp, which constituted some of the most important evidence of the Low Countries’ Roman past.32 It is worth noting that another member of the network, the painter Lucas de Heere, compiled a description of England, Scotland, and Ireland during his exile in England (between 1569 and 1574), pairing it with a historical survey from ancient times to the present (1574) along the lines of Guicciardini’s Descrittione.33 Positioning the Netherlandish Artist The epitheta Guicciardini uses to describe the artists in his long enumeration might seem stereotypical, but upon closer scrutiny they turn out to be carefully graded, not only according to technical prowess and professional success, but also according to an ideal shared by the humanists and antiquarians of his circle. Artist-antiquarians such as Lambert Lombard merit special emphasis; so too do those who can be shown to have brought back from Italy a new artistic form, type, or theory, like Jan van Scorel, Jan Gossaert, Frans Floris, Cornelis Floris and Pieter Coecke.34 Lombard, of course, had a number of Antwerp disciples (such as Frans Floris) who counted among Guicciardini’s primary sources — a fact which might explain the Florentine’s bias, to some extent. Nevertheless, this partiality corresponds perfectly with his closing argument, which emphasizes the benefit of going to Italy to learn from Italian masters and to see antique things. A generation earlier, Cornelis Grapheus had already been instrumental in presenting the aspirations of the Antwerp artistic vanguard to the outside world, particularly with regard to sculpture and architecture. He actively laid for them a foundation drawn from Published as Abraham Ortelius and Joannes Vivianus, Itinerarium per nonnullas Galliae Belgicae partes (Antwerp: Plantin, 1584); and Klaus Schmidt-Ott, Itinerarium per Nonnullas Galliae Belgicae Partes: Der Reiseweg durch einige Gebiete des belgischen Galliens von Abraham Ortelius und Johannes Vivianus. Übersetzung und Kommentar, Europäische Hochschulschriften. Reihe 3: Geschichte und ihre Hilfswissenschaften, 841 (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2000). 31 Sorgeloos, ‘Les Sources’, pp. 67–78. This network has been treated extensively in Tine Meganck, ‘Erudite Eyes: Artists and Antiquarians in the Circle of Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Princeton University, 2003). 32 Meganck, ‘Abraham Ortelius, Hubertus Goltzius en Guido Laurinus en de studie van de Arx Britannica’, Bulletin van de Koninklijke Nederlandse Oudheidkundige Bond, 98 (1999), 226–36; and Meganck, ‘Erudite Eyes’, pp. 19–35. 33 Meganck, ‘Chorography and Antiquity between the Low Countries and the British Isles (1568–1606)’, in Antiquarianism and Science in Early Modern Urban Networks, ed. by Vittoria Feola: ST&P 2nd series, 16, 2 (Paris: Blanchard, 2014), pp. 51–76 (pp. 55–57). 34 Recognized by Maldague, ‘La Part’, pp. 326–27. 30

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the proper authorities such as Vitruvius and Alberti. The first known instance actually goes back to 1528, when Cornelis published Pomponius Gauricus’s treatise De Sculptura at his brother Jan Grapheus’s printing house in Antwerp.35 This text proclaims that the sculptor, promoted as an intellectual, is superior to the stonecutter who practises a mere mechanical art, following Vitruvius and above all Alberti, both of whom are mentioned by Grapheus in his introduction.36 If he indeed introduced Pieter Coecke to Vitruvius’s treatise, Grapheus must be given credit for facilitating the social emancipation and self-fashioning of the architect, which had been slowly developing in Netherlandish urban construction throughout the great building boom of the fifteenth century.37 In Coecke’s Vitruvian manual Die Inventie der colommen, published in Antwerp in 1539 as the very first Netherlandish theoretical text on architecture, the new status of the master builder as a learned intellectual and master of disegno, an activity of the mind, could at last be expressed in terms derived from antiquity.38 Finally, in 1543, Grapheus — as town clerk — took down the deposition of Antwerp masters who had been called as expert witnesses in a professional dispute at Utrecht.39 To strengthen their case that architectural design was an independent, free, and geometrical art — ‘de consten van der geometrien ende architecturen’ — superior to mere manual labour, he added paraphrases from Vitruvius and Alberti, thus framing the debate within a respected theoretical context. It has been argued that a similar self-consciousness was shown by the decorations of the artists connected with the joyous entry of 1549.40 Only in court circles, however, were the new masters of design designated by the title of ‘artist’, a neologism in the Netherlandish language of the time and much less common in French and Spanish than in Italian.41 Imitating the example of the sculptor Bartholomé Ordóñez, with whom he had worked in Barcelona, Jean Mone was the first Netherlander to hold the office of ‘artist to the emperor’ (1522), soon followed by Pieter Coecke (1538) and Jacques Du Broeucq (1555). Pomponii Gaurici Neapolitani, viri undecunq[ue] doctissimi, De Sculptura seu Statuaria, libellus elegantissimus, pictoribus, sculptoribus, statuarijs, architectis, & c. (Antwerp: Jan Grapheus, 1528). See Prims, ‘Het eigen werk’, pp. 174–80 on Cornelis’s early literary production. 36 Pomponius Gauricus. De Sculptura (1504), ed. by André Chastel and Robert Klein, École pratique des hautes études, 4e section: Sciences historiques et philologiques, v, Hautes études médiévales et modernes, 5 (Geneva: Droz, 1969), pp. 19–22; and Martin Warnke, The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 85, 191. 37 Merlijn Hurx, Architect en aannemer. De opkomst van de bouwmarkt in de Nederlanden 1350–1530 (Nijmegen: Verloren, 2012), pp. 32–65. Grapheus might have been partly responsible for the decidedly Vitruvian bent of Pieter Coecke’s Serlio translations; his dedicatory poem to Book iv presents the treatise as an updated, explanatory guide to Vitruvius. Discussed at length in De Jonge, ‘Standardizing “Antique” Architecture’, and De Jonge, ‘Inventing the Vocabulary of Antique Architecture: The Early Translators and Interpreters of Renaissance Architectural Treatises in the Low Countries’, in Translating Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries, ed. by Harold J. Cook and Sven Dupré: Low Countries Studies on the Circulation of Natural Knowledge, 3 (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012), pp. 217–40. 38 Van Aelst, Die Inventie der colommen met haren coronamenten ende maten. Uut Vitruvio ende andere diversche Auctoren op corste vergadert voer scilders, beeltsniders, steenhouders, & c.  Ende allen die ghenuechte hebben in edificien der Antiquen (Antwerp: n. pub., 1539), pp. a4v–a5v. Only three copies out of a print run of more than 650 survive: Ghent, University Library, BHSL.RES.1448, incomplete; Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, 40.5.1 Geom., with water stain; and Munich, Staatsbibliothek, A.civ.53. Sune Schéle, ‘Pieter Coecke and Cornelis Bos’, Oud Holland, 77 (1962), 235–40, knew only of the first. 39 S.  Muller Fz., ‘Getuigenverhoor te Antwerpen over het maken van ontwerpen van gebouwen in de 16e eeuw door schilders, goudsmeden, timmerlieden en metselaars’, in Archief voor Nederlandsche Kunstgeschiedenis, 7 vols, ed. by Frederik Daniel Otto Obreen (Rotterdam: Van Hengel en Eeltjes, 1877–90), iv, 227–45. 40 Becker, ‘“Greater than Zeuxis”’, p. 188 connects these with the statements made by Guicciardini. 41 Discussed extensively in De Jonge, ‘The Court Architect as Artist in the Southern Low Countries 1520–1560’, in Envisioning the Artist, ed. by Chapman and Woodall, 110–35. 35

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In the metropolis of Antwerp, the new self-consciousness of the artist might also be expressed in his house.42 Decorated with allegorical painting and sculpture according to an erudite programme, the street façade stressed the artist’s status as pictor doctus, as shown in the houses of painter Frans Floris (c. 1563), his sculptor brother Cornelis (c. 1550/60), and the painter-merchant Cornelis van Dalem. Van Dalem’s house, Pictura (1563),43 showcased Dürer and Van Eyck in two busts placed at the sides of his door that, according to seventeenth-century tradition, were carved by Guillelmus Paludanus.44 Only a few years later, Paludanus followed with his own house Liefde (‘Love’) at the Wapper (1567).45 The perfect divulgatore (‘popularizer’) — to borrow a phrase from Guicciardini himself — of this new image of the artist was the print publisher Hieronymus Cock at the Sign of the Four Winds, a noted member of the antiquarian network described above.46 It has been argued that the pictorial equivalent of Guicciardini’s gallery of celebrated artists may indeed be found in the portrait series Pictorum aliquot celebrium germaniae inferioris effigies published posthumously in 1572 by his widow Volcxken Dierckx.47 The concept may have originated with Cock; the verses accompanying the portraits were composed, however, by Lampsonius, the first to dispute the supposed pre-eminence of Italian art posited by Vasari in his Lives. Lampsonius’s Vita Lombardi, published in Bruges in 1565, presented Lambert Lombard as the very epitome of the erudite collector and master, who had travelled to Italy and become an expert in Vitruvius.48 Lombard has pride of place in the series: he is the only one who is called both pictor and architectus; the others, even Coecke, are pictores. The series includes, in order, Hubert van Eyck, Jan van Eyck, Hieronymus Bosch, Rogier van der Weyden, Dieric Bouts, Bernard van Orley, Jan Gossaert, Joachim Patinir, Quinten Metsys, Lucas van Leyden, Jan van Amstel, Joos van Cleve, Matthijs Cock, Herri met de Bles, Jan Cornelisz. Vermeyen, Pieter Coecke van As recognized by Petra Maclot, ‘The Status of Stone: The Typology of the Urban Dwellings in Antwerp During the 15th and 16th Centuries’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leuven, 2014); and Wouk, ‘Humanae Societati Necessaria: The Painted Façade of the House of Frans Floris’, in The Notion of the Painter-Architect in Italy and the Southern Low Countries, ed. by Piet Lombaerde (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 89–125 (pp. 114–21). The following data have been kindly supplied by Dr Maclot. 43 Arenbergstraat, demolished; Everdijstraat 35; Lange Nieuwstraat, demolished, respectively. Van de Velde, Frans Floris, i, pp. 34–40; Rutger Tijs, Crowning the City: Vernacular Architecture in Antwerp from the Middle Ages to the Present Day (Antwerp: Mercator, 1993), p. 239; Jan Van Damme, ‘Portretbuste van Albrecht Dürer’, in Antwerpen, ed. by Van der Stock, pp. 165–66; Catherine King, ‘Artes Liberales and the Mural Decoration on the House of Frans Floris, Antwerp, c. 1565’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 52 (1989), no. 2, 239–56; and Wouk, ‘The Painted Façade’. 44 Becker, ‘“Greater than Zeuxis”’, p.  188 has pointed to the decorative chalice that the Guild of Saint Luke had manufactured in 1549: Dürer was represented between Zeuxis and Raphael, an effective pictorial shorthand for the thesis so ably translated by Guicciardini into text and by Cock into image. 45 Jozef Duverger and M. J. Onghena, ‘Beeldhouwer Willem van den Broecke alias Guilielmus Paludanus (1530 tot 1579 of 1580)’, Gentse bijdragen tot de kunstgeschiedenis, 5 (1938), 75–140 (pp. 94–97). 46 ‘Girolamo Cock inventore, & gran divulgatore per via di stampa dell’opere di Girolamo Bosco, & d’altri eccellenti Pittori, onde è veramente bene merito dell’arte’. Guicciardini, Descrittione (1567), p.  99. Joris Van Grieken, ‘Establishing and Marketing a Publisher’s List’, in Hieronymus Cock, pp. 22–29. On Cock as an antiquarian, see Meganck, ‘Erudite Eyes’, pp.  1–11, 19–94; and De Jonge, ‘Hieronymus Cock’s Antiquity: Archaeology and Architecture from Italy to the Low Countries’, in Hieronymus Cock, pp. 42–51. 47 Dominicus Lampsonius, Les Effigies des peintres célèbres des Pays-Bas, ed. by Jean Puraye (n.p. [Bruges?]: Desclée De Brouwer, 1956); Sarah Meiers, ‘Portraits in Print: Hieronymus Cock, Dominicus Lampsonius, and “Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies”’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 69  (2006), 1–16; Joris Van Grieken, ‘Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies: Portraits of Famous Painters from the Netherlands’, in Hieronymus Cock, 272–73; and Wouk, ‘The Painted Façade’, pp. 119–21. 48 Jean Hubaux and Jean Puraye, ‘Dominique Lampson Lamberti Lombardi  […] Vita. Traduction et notes’, Belgisch Tijdschrift voor oudheidkunde en kunstgeschiedenis/Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art, 18 (1949), 53–78 (pp. 64–65, 72); Puraye and Delcourt, Dominique Lampson, pp.  64–68; and Wouk, ‘Reclaiming the antiquities of Gaul: Lambert Lombard and the History of Northern Art’, Simiolus, 36 (2012), 35–65. 42

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Aelst, Lambert Lombard, Pieter Brueghel, Willem Key, Lucas Gassel, and Frans Floris; a portrait of Cock was also included in the group. Taken together, they combine both Netherlandish tradition and Italianate novelty into a new canon much in the manner of Guicciardini’s account.49 In architecture, a new artistic self-consciousness was expressed quite effectively by Hans Vredeman de Vries in his 1577 treatise Architectura, yet this Frisian immigrant, who had established himself in Antwerp from 1548 onwards,50 also introduced a note of conflict. Vredeman explicitly set the ‘antiquiteyte Italiaensche maniere and gebruyc’ (‘antique Italian manner and use’) in treatises by Vitruvius, Serlio, and others against the architecture of ‘ingenieuse meesters ende vervaren architecteurs deser Nederlanden’ (‘ingenious masters and experienced architects of these Low Countries’) such as Cornelis  I Floris (father of Cornelis  II Floris), Jacques Du Broeucq, Jean Guilgot, Jan de Heere, Cornelis  II Floris himself, and Willem Paludanus: all masters who had been able to ‘t’accomoderen naer ghelegentheyt deses landes ghebruycinghe en dienst, meer dan opt de Antiquen van noode is gheweest’ (‘accommodate [this antique architecture] to the necessities and customs of this country, more than was necessary in Antiquity’).51 Interestingly, the phrase resonates with the ongoing discussion on the use of the vernacular as opposed to — or in combination with — the classical tradition in Italian or French guise in contemporary literature and painting.52 This was a highly popular theme with prominent Antwerp rhetoricians such as Willem van Haecht, organizer of the famous 1561 Landjuweel — the very milieu in which Guicciardini found his information. Brueghel’s ‘peasants’, popularized in print by Hieronymus Cock, have also been interpreted in this light.53 Vredeman’s commentary actually constitutes the single most explicit textual testimony by an Antwerp figural artist of this ‘vernacular As argued by Walter  S. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel Van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991), p. 143. 50 Heiner Borggrefe, ‘Hans Vredeman de Vries 1526–1609’, in Tussen stadspaleizen en luchtkastelen. Hans Vredeman de Vries en de Renaissance, ed. by Heiner Borggrefe and others (Ghent: Ludion, 2002), pp. 15–38 (p. 15). 51 ‘Hoe wel dat den vermaerden Vitruvius, Sebastiaen Serlio, ende den experten Iacobus Androuetus Cerseau, ende meer andere diversche sorten der facien, edeficien, fronten oft gevels, naer de antiquiteyte Italiaense maniere en gebruyc haerder architecturen en bouwinghen ghestelt hebben, alsoomen in haerlieden en meer anderen meesters, baecken en patroonen bevindt, naer dien s’ landts aert, wesen en ghebruyc, sonder cruys-vensters, en sonderlinghen groot licht soeckende, noch hooge verdiepinghen, dan breet en weynich verdiepens: maer in dese Nederlanden heeftmen een ander conditie, namelijck in steden van grooter negotien, daer de plaetsen cleyn en dier sijn, moetmen al in de hoochde tot veel gheriefs, met veel lichts te crijgen, inventeren en soecken, elck na sijn gheleghentheyt en plaetse, tsy groot oft cleijn, de meeste commodite ende dienst der edificien oft logamenten der architecturen soecken ende ghebruycken op sijn ghelegen plaetse, sulcx wel ghebruyct en gheobserveert hebben dese naergenoemde en meer andere cloecke ende ingenieuse meesters ende vervaren architecteurs deser Nederlanden ter eeren, als meester A. Floris, de vader van Cornelis Floris, meester Jacques van Berghen, meester Jan Gilgho, meester Anthonis Mockaert, M.  Jan de Heere, superalij Cornelis Floris, tot Luyck  M. Thomas voor Guilliame Paludani, ende noch meer andere die ick niet en kenne, dan haer wercken wel betoonen, hun ingenie int bewijs der architecturen, te weten t’ accomoderen naer gheleghentheyt deses landes ghebruycinghe en dienst, meer dan opt de Antiquen van noode is gheweest, sulcx men in elck deel oft partije bevinden mach, en ondersoecken t’ mijne om een beter’. Hans Vredeman de Vries, Architectura Oder Bauung der Antiquen auss dem Vitruuius, woellches sein funff Collummen orden, daer auss mann alle Landts gebreuch vonn Bauuen zu accomodieren dienstlich fur alle Bawmaystren Maurer, Stainmetzlen, Schreineren Bildtschneidren, un dalle Liebhabernn der Architecturen, 2nd edn (Antwerp: Gerard de Jode, 1581), Netherlandish text to pl. 6 (Dorica). See also Peter Fuhring, The New Hollstein: Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts 1450–1700, xlviii, Vredeman de Vries, Part ii, 1572–1630 (Rotterdam: Sound & Vision Interactive, 1997), p. 57. 52 See, for instance, the essays collected in Understanding Art in Antwerp: Classicising the Popular, Popularising the Classic (c. 1540–1580), ed. by Bart Ramakers: Groningen Studies in Cultural Change, 45 (Leuven: Peeters, 2011). 53 See, most recently, Stephanie Porras, ‘Producing the Vernacular: Antwerp, Cultural Archaeology and the Bruegelian Peasant’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, 3  (2011), http://www.jhna.org/index.php/past-issues/vol-3-1/134producing-the-vernacular; and Woodall, ‘Lost in Translation? Thinking about Classical and Vernacular Art in Antwerp, 1540–1580’, in Understanding Art in Antwerp, pp. 1–24. 49

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self-awareness’, to borrow a phrase from Ramakers,54 equalling and even surpassing that of Lampson and his alter ego Lambert Lombard in the Vita Lombardi. Although only latent in Guicciardini’s text, the transplanted Florentine obliquely stakes a similar position in his discussion of the prices fetched by Netherlandish art on the market as a metaphor for its artistic importance, even if his emphasis on knowledge of the antique and of Italian novelties seems to suggest otherwise. Guicciardini’s subliminal message mirrors the prevailing ‘design strategy’ of the cosmopolitan Antwerp artist, integrating the best of two worlds.55 Postscript Thanks to Guicciardini’s Descrittione, the image of the Netherlandish artist as a welltravelled intellectual, a connoisseur of antiquity, and a master of technique reached a broad audience which was, like that of the Felicíssimo viaje and the Triumphe d’Anvers, an essentially international one. The book found a fertile and durable market. Among the many later editions of the Descrittione, the revised Plantin ones of 1581 (also in Italian), 1582 (in French, translated by F. de Belleforest), and 1588 (in Italian) stand out because of their lavish folio format and double-page illustrations.56 The rough woodcuts of the Silvius first edition, mainly town maps, were replaced by more up-to-date cartographical material by Plantin, taken in part from the vast floating stock available to this well-known publishing house, such as the city views of Braun and Hogenberg.57 Plantin also commissioned views of major buildings, especially in Antwerp, from Petrus van der Borcht. A  great many editions in different languages circulated in Europe well into the seventeenth century: for example, the augmented pocket-sized French-language edition published by Abraham Maire in Calais in 1609, noted for the eye-witness testimony of the war with France that was added by Pierre Du Mont the Elder.58 By that time, of course, Karel van Mander had comprehensively revised the profile of Netherlandish painting with his Schilder-Boeck (1604) — though not for sculpture and architecture.59

Ramakers, ‘As Many Lands, As Many Customs: Vernacular Self-Awareness Among the Netherlandish Rhetoricians’, in The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts, ed.  by Joost Keizer and Todd  M. Richardson: Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture, 19 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp.  123–77 (pp.  131–34). Ramakers does not discuss Vredeman de Vries, but points to the ‘self-conscious blending of native and non-native traditions’ by contemporary painters, especially Bruegel, parallel to the poetry of the time. See also Ramakers, ‘Bruegel en de rederijkers. Schilderkunst en literatuur in de zestiende eeuw’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 47 (1966), 81–105. With thanks to the author. 55 A view defended by, among others, Todd  M. Richardson, ‘Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Vernacular Cultivation’, in Understanding Art in Antwerp, pp. 115–30. 56 Herman de La Fontaine Verwey, ‘The History of Guicciardini’s Description of the Low Countries’, Quaerendo, 12 (1982), 22–51; Monique Jacqmain, ‘Les Deux traductions françaises de la “Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi”’, in Lodovico Guicciardini (1521–1589), ed. by Jodoigne, 163–77; and Guicciardini, Description de touts les Pais-Bas, autrement appellés la Germanie inférieure, ou Basse Allemagne, trans. by François de Belleforest (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1582), Royal Library of Belgium, VH 25.765 C LP (with hand-coloured plates). 57 Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, Civitates orbis terrarum, 6  vols (Cologne: Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, 1572–1618). 58 Description de touts les Pays-Bas, autrement appellez la Germanie inférieure, ou Basse Allemagne (Calais: Abraham Maire, 1609). We consulted a copy in the Royal Library of Belgium, VB 10.058 C LP. 59 Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon; and Hessel Miedema, Karel van Mander: The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the First Edition of the Schilder-boeck (1603–1604), 6 vols (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1994–99). 54

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Appendix 1 The text transcribed here is from Lodovico Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, altrimenti detti Germania inferiore (Antwerp: Guilielmus Silvius, 1567), pp.  97–101. Additions from Lodovico Guicciardini, Descrittione  […] di tutti i Paesi Bassi, altrimenti detti Germania inferiore (Antwerp: Christofano Plantino, 1581), pp.  141–47 appear italicized and in square brackets. [p. 97] Sono o oltre e tutte queste in Anversa le tre Confrerie dette di Rettorica, cio è quella delle Violiere, quella del Goublom[m]e, & quella d’Oliftack: le quali servono per intrattenere, & festeggiare di quando in quando alle loro stanze publiche, il popolo con com[m]edie, con tragedie, & con altre historie & piaceri civili & morali, ad imitatione de Greci & de Romani, onde si vede & impara molte cose degne & utili. La principale, & piu antica d’esse tre Confrerie, è quella dell Violiere, nella quale quasi tutti sono Pittori, che in tutte le attioni rendono conto & chiara testimonianza dell’acutezza, & dell’ingegno loro. Ma perche l’arte della Pittura, & per utilità, & per honore è cosa di momento, no[n] solamente in Anversa, & in Malines, ove è mestiere d’importanza, ma arte importante ancora per tutto il paese, par’ conveniente, & a proposito di nominare alcuni di quegli, che in queste bande l’hanno piu ampliata, & piu illustrata vivi & morti. Et prima dico che in queste Regioni sole, sono piu dipintori d’ogni specie, & professione, che non sono in molte altre Provincie in sieme: & si come il numero è grande, & grande l‘esercitio, cosi ci sono & sono stati molti gran’ maestri d’arte & d’inventione. I principali & piu nominati di quelli, che piu modername[n] te hanno terminata questa vita, sono stati Giovan[n]i d’Eick, quello il quale (come narra Giorgio Vasari Aretino nella sua bellissima opera de Pittori eccellenti) fu inventore intorno all’anno m.cccc.x del colorito a olio, cosa importantissima & dignissima in quell’arte, perche conserva il colore quasi perpetuamente, ne mai piu che s’habbia notitia, stata ritrovata alla memoria de gli huomini. Mandò costui delle sue opere in Italia al grande Alfonso Re di Napoli, al Duca d’Urbino, & ad altri Principi che furono molto stimate, onde il gran Lorenzo de Medici ne raccolse poi anche egli la parte sua. Truovasi in queste bande fra le altre sue opere, in Guanto nella chiesa di S. Bavone l’eccellentissima tavola del trionfo dell’Agnus Dei, benche alcuni inpropriamente la nominino d’Adam, & Eva: opera nel vero maravigliosa & ammiranda in tanto che il Re Filippo desiderandola, & non osando di la torla, la fece ultimamante ritrar[r]e per mandare in Hispagna, dall’eccellente maestro Michele Cockisien, il quale statovi sopra circa due anni, havendo servito per eccellenza, hebbe dal Re, oltre ad altre habilità fatelli, del vitto & de colori, per parere & sententia di quattro maestri dell’arte, due mila ducati per la fattione, benche non si contentando, pare che il Re allargasse ancor’ la mano. Et medesimamente in Bruggia nella chiesa di S. Donatiano, è una bellissima Pittura di quel’ maestro con l’imagine di nostra Donna, & d’altri santi. Ancor a Ipri n’è un’altra bella & memorabile. Dimorava il detto Giovanni il piu del tempo nella trionfante citta di Bruggia, ove finalmente si mori in grande honore. A pari a pari de Giovanni andava Huberto suo fratello, il quale viveva, & dipingeva continuame[n] te sopra le medesime opere, insieme con esso fratello. A Giovanni, & a Huberto successe nella virtu & nella fama 125

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[p. 98] Rugieri vander Vveiden di Bruselles, il quale fra le altre cose fece le quattro degnissime tavole d’ammiranda historia, a proposito & esemplo del far’ giustitia, che si veggono in detta terra di Bruselles al Palazzo de signori, nella propria stanza, ove si consultano & deliberano le cause. A  Ruggieri successe Hausse suo scolare, il quale fece un’ bel quadro a Portinari, che hoggi ha il Duca di Fiorenza, & a Medici medesimi fece la bella tavola di Careggi. Seguirono a mano a mano Lodovico da Lovano, Pietro Crista, Martino d’Holanda, & Giusto da Guanto, che fece quella nobil’ pittura della communione al Duca d’Urbino, & dietro a lui venne Ugo d’Anversa, che fece la bellissima tavola, che si vede a Firenze in Santa Maria nuova. A questi aggiugneremo cosi co[n]sumamente diversi altri trapassati, veramente chiari, & memorabili, & prima Dirick da Lovano gra[n]dissimo artefice, Quintino della medesima terra gran’ maestro di far’ figure, del quale fra le altre cose si vede la bellissima tavola del nostro signore, posta nella chiesa di nostra donna in quella terra, Gios di Cleves cittadino d’Anversa rarissimo nel colorire, & tanto eccellente nel ritrarre dal naturale, che havendo il Re Francesco primo mandati qua huomini a posta, per condurre alla Corte qualche maestro egregio, costui fu l’eletto, & condotto in Francia ritrasse il Re, & la Regina, & altri Prinicpi con somma laude, & premi grandissimi, Girolamo Bosco di Bolduc, inventore nobilissimo, & maraviglioso di cose fantastiche & bizarre, Bernardo di Bruselles, Giovanni di Ber, & Mattias Cock d’Anversa, Giovanni d’Hemessen presso d’Anversa, Simone Beninc grandissimo maestro nel miniare, Gherardo eccellentissimo nell’alluminare, & Lancilotto mirabile nel far’ apparire un’ fuoco vivi, & naturale, come l’incendio di Troia, & simili cose, tutti & tre di Bruggia, Giovanni di Mabuge, il quale fu il primo che portò d’Italia in questi paesi, l’arte del dipingere Historie, & poesie con figure nude: fece costui fra le altre sue opere quella eccellente tavola, che si vede nella gran’ Badia di Middelborgo in Silanda, Giovanni Cornelis d’Amsterdam pittore eccellente, Lamberto della medesima terra, Giovanni Scorle Canonico d’Utrecht, maestro degnissimo, [ed. 1581, p. 143: no(n) meno nell’architettura, che nella pittura,] il quale portò d’Italia molte inventioni, & nuovi modi di dipingere, Giouacchino di Pattenier di Bovines, Henrico da Dinant, Giovanni Bellagamba di Douai, Dirick d’Harlem, & Francesco Mostarert della medesima terra, raro ne paesaggi a olio, Pietro Couck d’Alost, gran’ pittore & grande inventore di patroni da Tapezzarie, a cui si da laude d’haver’ portato d’Italia, la maestra dell’architettura, traducendo inoltre l’egregia opera di Sebastiano Serlio Bolognese in questa lingua Teutonica, che dicono haver’ fatto gran’ servigio al paese, Giovanni di Calcker, il quale viveva in Italia, a la si mori, Carlo d’Ipri, Marino di Sirissea, & Luca Hurembout di Guanto grandissimo pittore, & singulare nell’arte di alluminare. Et anco ci sono state nella Pittura donne eccellenti, delle quali nomineremo solamente tre, l’una fu Susanna sorella di Luca Hurembout prenominato: la [p. 99] quale fu eccellente nella pittura, massime nel fare opere minutissime oltre a ogni credere, & eccellentissima nell’alluminare, in tanto che il gran’ Re Henrico ottavo con gran’ doni & gran’ provvisione, la tirò in Inghilterra, dove visse molti anni in gran’ favore, & gratia di tutta la Corte, & ivi finalmente si mori ricca, & honorata: la seconda fu Clara Skeysers 126

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medesimamente di Guanto gran’ pittrice, & grande illuminatrice, la quale visse severamente ottanta anni vergine: la terza fu Anna figliuola di maestro Segher gia nominato, fisico eccellente, nativo di Breda, & cittadino d’Anversa: la qual’ Anna molto virtuosa & divota servando anche essa virginità, fini poco fa i giorni suoi. Hor’ parleremo de vivi, & prima porremo Francesco Floris, pittore tanto eccellente nella sua propria professione d’inventione & di disegno, che di qua da monti per tante & tante Provincie non ha forse pari, parche nel vero è maestro singulare, & poi di natura è huomo molto gentile & cortese: a costui s’attribuisce la palma d’haver portato d’Italia la maestra del far’ muscoli & scorci naturali, & maravigliosi. Segue Guglielmo Cai di Breda cittadino d’Anversa, pittore d’Historie eccellente, ma eccellentissimo nel ritrarre dal naturale, huomo osbrio, severo, & acuto, Giovanni Quintino figliuolo di Quintino da Lovano, mentionato piu alto, Girolamo Cock inventore, & gran divulgatore per via di stampa dell’opere di Girolamo Bosco, & d’altri eccellenti Pittori, onde è veramente bene merito dell’arte, Martino di Vos buon’ maestro di colori & d’inventione, como del ritrarre dal naturale, Luigi van Hort assai felice nel ritrarre, & contraffare molte cose, & Iacopo Grimer gra[n]de artefice in paesaggi tutti nativi d’Anversa, Michele Cockisien mentionato di sopra, homo veramente rare & molto celebrato nell’arte, onde le opere sue sono in grande estimatione & pregio, Hanz Bol eccellente ne paesaggi a tempera, Crispiano, & Henrico Palidamo, discepolo di Francesco Floris, ancor’ giovane, ma di grande & penetrante spirito; stette un’ pezzo col Duca di Firenze, ove dato buon’ sagio del suo valore, andò dopoi a Roma, tutti & quattro di Malines, Antonio Monrh d’Utrecht pittore del Re Filippo, maestro celeberrimo, & egregio, specialmente nell’ artificio del ritrarre altrui con prontezza, & vivacità stupenda dal naturale, cosa certamente che rende non manco maraviglia, che diletto, & egli oltre a tanta virtu, ha altre parti & qualità, che a quella nobilmente corrispondono, Lamberto Lombardo di Liege huomo degno, litterato, & di gran’ iudicio: & non solo eccellente pittore, ma anche grande architettore, il quale fu qualche tempo maestro di Francesco Floris, & di Guglielmo Cai sopra detti: costui fra le altre sue virtu si diletta molto delle medaglie antiche, & pero n’ha raccolto, & va racclogliendo generosamente gran’ numero, Pietro Brueghel di Breda grande imitatore della scienza, & fantasie di Girolamo Bosco, onde n’ha anche acquisato il sopranome di secondo Girolamo bosco. Pietro Aertsen alias Pietro Lungo d’Am[p. 100] sterdam, maestro famoso & degno, il quale fece quella nobilissima tavola con le sue alie nella chiesa di nostra donna, della medesima terra d’Amsterdam, la qual’ pittura con gli suoi ornamenti, costò intorno a due mila scudi, Martino Hemskerck d’Holanda discepolo di Giovanni Scorle, Lamberto van Hort d’Amersfort, pittore & architettore grande, Gilis Mostarert fratello di Francesco predetto, Pietro Pourbus, il cui figliuolo Francesco discepolo di Francesco Floris ancor’ che giovanetto, apparisce eccellente, Giovanni Vredemanni Frisio, & tanti altri buon’ maestri & giovani di gra[n]de espettatione, che saria mestieri de fare un’ opera a parte per nominarli tutti. E di donne vive nomineremo quattro: la prima è Levina, figliuola di maestro Simone di Bruggia gia me[n]tionato, la quale nel miniare come il padre è tanto felice & eccellente, che il prefato Henrico Re d’Inghilterra la volle con ogni premio haver’ a ogni modo alla sua Corte, ove fu poi maritata nobilmente, fu molto amata dalla Regina Maria, & hora è amatissima dalla 127

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Regina Elisabetta: la seconda è Caterina figliuola di maestro Giovanni d’Hemssen gia nominato, moglie di Christiano eccellentissimo Sonatore di buon’ accordo, & d’altri strumenti talche la Regina d’Ungheria per la loro rara virtu li condusse seco amendue in Hispagna, ove poi alla sua morte, lasciò ancor’ loro provvisione a vita: la terza e Maria di Bessemers di Malines, che fu moglie di maestro Pietro Couck d’Alost, nominato di sopra: & la quarta sia Anna Smiters di Guanto veramente gran pittrice, & grande illuminatrice. L’opere de quali Pittori sono sparse non solamente per tutti questi paesi, ma sparse ancora per la maggior’ parte del mondo, perche se ne fa mercantia di non piccola importanza. E ancor honesto & ragionevole di nominare alcuni eccellenti Pittori in vetri da finestre, si perche l’arte in se è bellissima, & importante, si perche ella è stata condotta dalle genti di qua (come narra anche il prefato Vasari) all’intera perfettione, havendo costoro trovato oltre alla vaghezza, & vivacità de colori, il misterio di cuocergli in sul vetro, onde ne per acqua, ne per vento, ne per tempo essi colori si perdono mai, come prima si perdevano, quando con gomme, & con altre tempere gl’usavan’ fare: & costoro anche hanno trovato il modo del commettergli insieme col piombo. I principali dell’arte, sono stati Art van Hort di Nimega, borghese d’Anversa grandissimo imitatore de disegni d’Italia, & il primo che travasse la maestra dicuocere & colorire sopra il vetro Christallino, Dirick Iacobs Felart maestro eccellentissimo, & di grande inventione, Dirick Sas di Campen, Giovanni Ack d’Anversa, che tanto eccellentemente dipinse le finestre della cappella del sacramento nella chiesa di santa Gudula in Bruselles, & Cornelio di Bolduc. Et di presente vivono Cornelio van Dal maestro singulare di tutte sorte di colori, sopra vetro, o cristallo, come se fussero a olio, & inoltre fa da se medesimo i disegni, Gios Vereghen grandissimo maestro, & molto reputato nell’arte, sta con [p. 101] l’Imperadore, amendue d’Anversa, Giovanni Stas figliuolo del sopra detto Dirick, degno della virtu del padre, & Giovanni di Zele d’Utrecht. Nella Architettura, & nella Scultura parimente, non ci sono mancati, ne mancano valenthuomini chiari & memorabili, come piu frescamente furono Sebastiano d’Oia d’Utrecht, grandissimo Architettore di Carlo Quinto Imperadore, & del Re Filippo, il quale con gran laude & honore, disegnò & ordino Edinfert, Carlomont, & Filipovila terre di frontiera foritssime, Guglielmo Cueur di Goude in Holanda grande Architettore, & maggiore Scultore, Giovanni di Dale buono Scultore, & elegante Poeta, Luca Leiden grande intagliatore in rame, & Guglielmo d’Anversa Architettore molto reputato. Et di presente vivono Iacopo Bruecq nato vicino a S.  Omero gentilhuomo grande Scultore, & famoso architettore, ordinò Bossu & poi Marimont, & altri superbi edifitij alla Regina d’Ungheria Reggente del paese, Giovanni di Bologna da Douai suo discepolo, huomo chiaro & stimato nell’arte, sta col Prinicpe di Firenze, Giovanni Minesheren di Guanto architettore & scultor’ grande, [ed. 1581, p. 146: il cui figliuolo Luca persona di qualità, è Pittore, & inventore di piu cose, & buon’ Poeta,] Matteo Man[n]emacker d’Anversa grandissimo scultore, sta col Re de Romani, Cornelio Floris: fratello di Francesco Floris, è architettore & scultor’ grande, huomo molto diligente & servitiale, a cui s’attribuisce l’honore d’essere stato il primo, che portasse d’Italia in questi paesi l’arte del contrafare le grottesche al naturale, Lamberto Suavio di Liege buono architettore, & intagliatore singulare in rame, Guglielmo Palidamo, fratello 128

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d’Henrico predetto grande scultore, studioso & diligente, Giovanni di Sart di Nimega eccellente scultore, Simone di Delft, & Gios Ianson d’Amsterdam medesimame[n]te buoni scultori, Giorgio Robin d’Ipri, Dirick Volcaerts Core[n]hert, & Filippo Galle amendue d’Harlem eccelle[n]tissimi intagliatore, & poi ta[n]ti & tanti altri, che sarebbe troppo lungo a raccontargli. I quali dipintori, Architettori, & Scultori mentionati sono stati quasi tutti in Italia, chi per imparare, chi per vedere cose antiche, & conoscere gli huomini eccelle[n]ti della loro professione, & chi per cercar’ ventura, & farsi conoscere, onde adempiuto il desiderio loro, ritornano il piu delle volte alla patria con esperienza, con facultà, & con honore: Et di qui poi si spargono maestri per l’Inghilterra, per tutta l’Alamagna, & specialme[n]te per la Danimarca, per la Suetia, per la Norvegia, per la Pollonia, & per altri paese Settentrionali, infino per la Moscovia, senza parlare di quelli che vanno per la Francia, per la Spagna & per il Portogallo il piu delle volte chiamati con gran’ provvisione da Principi, da Republiche, & da altri Potentati, cosa non meno maravigliosa che honorata.

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Inventing Europe in Antwerp’s 1520 Entry for Charles V An Erasmian Allegory in the Face of Global Empire Elisabeth Neumann University of Toronto

The celebratory entry welcoming Charles  V into Antwerp in 1520, on the eve of his coronation as King of the Romans and Emperor-Elect, represented the city to her prince in an entirely new way. Tailored to the historical moment and to the cultural values of both the municipal elite and Charles’s court, the entry’s unusual and innovative programme was the creation of Peter Gillis, learned city secretary and friend to Erasmus and Thomas More. The entry he designed broke the mould for this sort of event in several significant ways; among its unprecedented aspects was the portrayal of Antwerp as quintessentially European at a time when no one would have identified him- or herself in this way. In the early sixteenth century, the term ‘Europe’ was seldom used except in geographical texts, and these merely equated Europe with Christendom.1 Indeed, the political ideal of ‘being European’ was first proposed in the theatrical tableaux of the 1520 Antwerp entry, in a newly invented image of world order: the continental allegory. At the culmination of the entry programme, personifications of Europe, Asia, and Africa were shown united in welcoming the emperor’s rule. On closer scrutiny this image, which might have suggested the fulfilment of the emperor’s highest aspirations as a universal monarch, is revealed instead to have promoted an Erasmian pacifism. One way of understanding the many unusual characteristics of the programme is to see the entry as part of a public dialogue between the city and her sovereign. Viewed from this perspective, the entry presentations constructed this relationship as that of a loyal and extremely learned councillor advising an emperor at the outset of his reign. The continental allegory directed the audience — and particularly Charles — to acquire the fruits of scholarly study, not the spoils of war. In view of the 2012 awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union, it seems particularly fitting to look back at Antwerp’s invention of a European identity during an event that articulated the city’s fervent wishes for Charles’s rule to be, above all, a reign of peace.

Peter Burke, ‘Did Europe Exist Before 1700?’, History of European Ideas, 1/1 (1980), 21–29. Of the many works on the history of the idea of Europe, Denys Hay’s remains indispensable: Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957).

1

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 133-146. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114005

Elisabeth Neumann

Antwerp’s 1520 entry is curiously understudied: it has never been the subject of any sustained analysis.2 This relative neglect is surprising since the entry provides a fascinating example of urban communication with a monarch whose horizons had suddenly become global. Although its best-known feature is in fact the continental allegory presented on the last of its thirteen stages, this been understood simply as imperial panegyric, suggesting the universal scope of Charles’s power.3 Both the entry as a whole and the personified continents at its culmination are far more interesting than this would suggest. The continental allegory expressed civic concerns more than it did imperial dreams and, more unexpectedly, placed Antwerp at the forefront of vociferously contested scholarly practice. The absence of any thorough study of the 1520 entry is particularly remarkable since we have an official printed description of the entry, commissioned by the city and published by the city printer, Michael Hillen, also in 1520.4 Our knowledge of the entry stems almost entirely from this description that is, unfortunately, not illustrated. It is the earliest printed pamphlet for an Antwerp entry and is preceded in the Netherlands only by that of the much more famous Bruges entry of 1515.5 The Antwerp account was written by the event’s designer, Peter Gillis, who is remembered today mostly for his friendships with More and Erasmus, as commemorated in a double portrait by Quentin Massys.6 Gillis supervized the publication of works by both these friends and wrote a prefatory letter for the first edition of More’s Utopia. Gillis was a respected humanist and jurist in his own right and, as a long-serving griffier (‘city secretary’), he was responsible for the allegorical programme of the entry (assisted by fellow secretary Cornelius Grapheus). Thus Gillis should be credited with devising an entirely new subject in the visual arts: the continental allegory.7 The pamphlet describing the entry, the Hypotheses spectaculorum Caes. Carolo  […], is today quite rare and was written and Elizabeth McGrath considers the 1520 entry only briefly in her study of humanist interest in continental allegories during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. McGrath, ‘Humanism, Allegorical Invention, and the Personification of the Continents’, in Concept, Design, and Execution in Flemish Painting, 1550–1700, ed. by Hans Vlieghe, Arnout Balis, and C. van de Velde (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp. 43–71. See also Hugo Soly, ‘Plechtige intochten in de steden van de Zuidelijke Nederlanden tijdens de overgang van Middeleeuwen naar Nieuwe Tijd: communicatie, propaganda, spektakel’, Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis, 97 (1984), 341–62 (p. 350), which includes a brief description of the thirteen stages of the entry in the context of a broader discussion of the functions of Netherlandish triumphal entries. An account of the roots of such entries can be found in Paul Vandenbroeck, Rondom plechtige intredes en feestelijke stadsversieringen: Antwerpen 1594–1599–1635 (Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 1981), pp. 6–31. More recently, on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century entries in Antwerp, see Margit Thøfner, A Common Art: Urban Ceremonial in Antwerp and Brussels During and After the Dutch Revolt (Zwolle: Waanders, 2007) and Stijn Bussels, Spectacle, Rhetoric and Power: The Triumphal Entry of Prince Philip of Spain into Antwerp (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012). Both focus on later entries, making little mention of the 1520 entry. 3 Soly, ‘Plechtige intochten’, p. 350; and Peter Burke, ‘Presenting and Re-presenting Charles V’, in Charles V and his Time, 1500–1558, ed. by Hugo Soly (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 2000), pp. 392–449. 4 Pieter Gillis (Petrus Aegidius), Hypotheses sive argumenta spectaculorum quae sereniss. & invincissimo Caes. Carolo Pio, Felici, Inclyto, semper Aug. praeter alia multa et varia Fides et Amor celebratissime civitatis Antwerpiensis antistites (superis faventibus) sunt edituri. (Antwerp: Michael Hillen, 1520). It was included in multiple seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editions of Marquard Freher, Rerum germanicarum scriptores, 3 vols (Hannover: Wechel, 1600–02), iii, pp. 174–77. Gillis’s Hypotheses is accessible online at http://diglib.hab.de/drucke/217-1-quod-17s/start.htm [accessed 29 August 2014]. 5 Remy Du Puys, La Tryumphante Entree de Charles Prince des Espagnes en Bruges 1515: A Facsimile with an Introduction, ed. by Sydney Anglo (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Johnson Reprint Corporation, n.d. [1973]). 6 For a biographical sketch of Gillis by Marcel A. Nauwelaerts, see Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. by Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, 3 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), ii, pp. 99–101. 7 On the novelty of the continental allegory see below. Grapheus is best known as the author of the 1549 triumphal entry of Charles and his heir, Prince Philip. The extent of his involvement in the 1520 entry is unclear; he was also employed as a city secretary at the time and is mentioned at the end of Gillis’s pamphlet as having assisted with the ‘characteres a Secretis’ (‘signs from the Mysteries’). Floris Prims, ‘Het eigen werk van Cornelis Grapheus (1482–1558)’, Antwerpiensia, 12 (1938), 172–84. 2

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Inventing Inventing Europe Europe in in Antwerp’s 1520 Entry for Charles V

published only in Latin, indicating that it was directed at an elite, learned audience. It may have been produced primarily for presentation by the city to Charles V and members of his court so that they might study it at leisure. In this respect it differs from the pamphlets published for two entries that bracket this one chronologically: Remy Du Puys’s account of the 1515 entry of Charles into Bruges and Cornelius Grapheus’s report of the 1549 entry of Charles and his heir, Prince Philip, into Antwerp.8 Both these descriptions are copiously illustrated with full-page or double-page woodcuts representing each of the ephemeral structures, complete with the theatrical tableaux they displayed. Their appeal to a wider audience was further enhanced by their publication in the vernacular (Du Puys’s in French and Grapheus’s in French and Dutch translations of the Latin version). The entry programme of 1520 might be considered a theatrical speculum principis, or Mirror for Princes, instructing Charles V in the virtues of good government. Scholars have often compared Netherlandish triumphal entries with this literary genre, since both balanced laudatory and admonitory functions.9 Such public rituals in the Burgundian Netherlands of the fifteenth century have been understood more generally as an important part of dramatized communications between urban publics and the princely court.10 While still less studied, the triumphal entries of the Habsburg Netherlands in the sixteenth century have also been seen as civic performances that engaged in negotiation with the city’s sovereign.11 The entry of Charles V with his heir, Prince Philip, into Antwerp in 1549 has been considered in this light, as have the later entries of the Duke of Anjou (1582) and those of Albert and Isabella at the turn of the seventeenth century.12 As noted above, the 1520 entry of Charles into Antwerp has received scant mention in this literature, although it represents an interesting variation on the theme of communication between the city and her prince. Here the entry has been consciously conceived as a humanist treatise for the edification of a young prince.13 Cornelius Grapheus, Spectaculorum in susceptione Philippi hisp. Prin. divi Caroli V. Caes. f. An. M. D. XLIX, Antverpiae aeditorum, mirificus apparatus (Antwerp: Gillis Coppens van Diest, 1550) http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0002/ bsb00029522/image_1 [accessed 29 August 2014]. On the 1549 entry and for current bibliography, see the essay by Stijn Bussels and Bram Van Oostveldt in this volume; see also Wouter Kuyper, The Triumphant Entry of Renaissance Architecture into the Netherlands: The Joyeuse Entrée of Philip of Spain into Antwerp in 1549, Renaissance and Mannerist Architecture in the Low Countries from 1530 to 1630, 2 vols (Alphen aan den Rijn: Canaletto, 1994). 9 Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, ‘The Early Modern Festival Book: Function and Form’, in Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe, ed. by J. R. Mulryne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 3–18. 10 The most important works in this respect are: Peter Arnade, Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Arnade, ‘City, State, and Public Ritual in the Late Medieval Burgundian Netherlands’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 39 (1996), 300–18; Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, La Ville des ceremonies. Essai sur la communication politique dans les anciens Pays-Bas bourguignons (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004); and Soly, ‘Plechtige intochten’, pp. 341–61. 11 Anne-Laure van Bruaene, ‘The Habsburg Theatre State: Court, City and the Performance of Identity in the Early Modern Southern Low Countries’, in Networks, Regions and Nations: Shaping Identities in the Low Countries, 1300–1650, ed. by Robert Stein and Judith Pollmann: Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, 149 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 131–49 (pp. 132–33). 12 Mark Meadow, ‘Ritual and Civic Identity in Philip II’s 1549 Antwerp Blijde Incompst’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (1998), 37–67; Meadow, ‘“Met geschickter ordenen”: The Rhetoric of Place in Philip  II’s 1549 Antwerp Blijde Incompst’, Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, 57 (1999), 1–11; Bussels, Spectacle, Rhetoric and Power; Emily Peters, ‘Printing Ritual: The Performance of Community in Christopher Plantin’s La Joyeuse & Magnifique Entrée de Monseigneur Francoys […] d’Anjou (Antwerp, 1582)’, Renaissance Quarterly, 61  (2008), 370–413 (a facsimile edition published in Amsterdam by Theatrum Urbis Terrarum in 1973 is available under the same title with an introduction by Helen Purkis); Thøfner, A Common Art, pp. 206–25; and Van Bruaene, ‘Spectacle and Spin for a Spurned Prince: Civic Strategies in the Entry Ceremonies of the Duke of Anjou in Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent (1582)’, Journal of Early Modern History, 11 (2007), 263–84. 13 The similarity of the 1520 entry account with the Mirror for Princes literature is confirmed by the recycling of large portions of the text by Gerhard Geldenhouwer for his Enchiridion christiani principis ac magistratus (Handbook for Princes and Magistrates), which was published in 1541 and dedicated to William, Duke of Guelders, Juliers, and Cleve. See I. P. Bejczy, ‘Gerard Geldenhouwer of Nijmegen: Epistoal de officio christiani principis (1538); Enchiridion principis ac magistratus christiani (1539)’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 40 (1991), 168–205. 8

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What is perhaps most striking about how Gillis’s pamphlet presents this theatrical event is the complete absence of any description of its processional or ceremonial aspects — precisely those features that performed the most immediate political functions for their audiences.14 Gillis’s account is also unique among documented Netherlandish entries in not emphasizing the connections between the ephemeral structures and the fabric of the city through which the sovereign and the civic representatives passed in procession. In other entries, the specific locations of the displays were clearly important for the constitution of local identities. Consequently, these sites were key elements of the presentation of an idealized city to her sovereign and were invariably mentioned in the descriptive pamphlets.15 The 1520 entry, in contrast, seems not to have incorporated and transformed the city in this way. In his descriptive text, Gillis was concerned primarily with explaining the allegories of good government presented on the thirteen stages and not with the ritual performances that accompanied them. The political wisdom embodied on the stages appeared as universally valid: there were no local references to Antwerp, the city’s corporations and institutions, or to past Burgundian or Habsburg rulers. Gillis also makes no mention of pageants contributed by the foreign merchant communities resident in Antwerp and it is unclear if they sponsored any. In the published accounts of the 1515 and 1549 entries, contributions by foreign merchants were carefully distinguished from those by the city and its institutions. In contrast to those pamphlets, Gillis’s account was remarkably unified, unfolding in an unbroken sequence of political allegories. This heightened its similarities with Mirror for Princes treatises but also had further political significance. It presented the city as the univocal author of the welcoming celebrations, thereby suggesting a civic cohesion that, however fictional, might nonetheless convey to Charles and his court the excellence of Antwerp’s municipal government. Beginning as early as the title page, Gillis underlined the constancy and stability that were the foundation of Antwerp’s loyalty to her rulers, citing a relevant passage from Cicero’s De amicitia.16 Given the history of civic revolt in the Netherlands, Gillis could expect that such virtues would register favourably with the city’s overlord.17 Antwerp’s ­stated loyalty to her Habsburg rulers was more than mere rhetoric: it called to mind the city’s unwavering support for Charles’s grandfather, Maximilian  I, during the Flemish Revolts (1482–92). Siding with Maximilian in this turbulent period of his regency, the city provided troops, financial resources, and a base of operations for his incursions into Flanders.18 There is some evidence in contemporary chronicles that these processional and ceremonial components were of particular significance for the middle groups of the city — guild members and prosperous craftsmen and merchants — whose support was critical for the magistrate. Thøfner, A Common Art, pp. 102–13. The processional ordering of the city’s corporate bodies was often a point of contention (for example in the 1549 Antwerp entry) which signals its wider political significance. 15 The accounts of the Bruges 1515 and Antwerp 1549 entries both gave the location of each display. This function of the ephemeral architecture was underlined in Du Puys’s pamphlet, which described how several of the structures mimicked important civic buildings. Sydney Anglo, ‘Introduction’, in Du Puys, La Tryumphante, pp. 4–34. 16 Marcus Tullius Cicero, De amicitia, xviii. 65: ‘Firmamentum autem stabilitatis, constantieque est eius quam in amicitia quaerimus Fides, Nihil enim stabile est, quod infidum est’. (‘Now the support and stay of that unswerving constancy, which we look for in friendship, is loyalty; for nothing is constant that is disloyal’). Translation found in Cicero. De senectute, De amicitia, De divinatione, Loeb Classical Library, trans. by W. A. Falconer (London: W. Heinemann, 1923). 17 Civic politics in Ghent and Bruges in the fifteenth century were volatile, leading to repeated civic revolts characterized by considerable factionalism; for an account of the entries associated with them see Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 31–49. For fifteenth-century Ghent see also Arnade, Realms of Ritual, pp. 127–58. 18 Prims and J.  van Roey,  Geschiedenis van Antwerpen, 8  vols (Brussels: Uitgeverij kultuur en beschaving Gabriel Lebonlaan, 1977), V, pp. 27–44. 14

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Even when Brussels and other Brabantine cities joined an expanded revolt in 1488, Antwerp remained firmly loyal. During this time, the city was rewarded by Maximilian with the granting of important trade privileges to the detriment first of Ghent and Bruges and then also of Brussels. Perhaps the most important of these, which gave the impetus for the growth of Antwerp’s international market, was the statute issued by Maximilian’s government in 1488 that foreign merchants resident in Bruges should transfer their residences to Antwerp, where they would have the same privileges and freedoms they had enjoyed at Bruges.19 In significant ways, the flourishing of Antwerp’s trade was the reward for the city’s loyalty to the Habsburg cause. The internal political stability of the city, which was referred to on Gillis’s title page, was also underlined in the pamphlet’s closing verse, which emphasized the broad civic participation in — and, presumably, the endorsement of — the 1520 entry: Petrus Aegidius ab actis ciuitatis scribebat, Cornelius Grapheus a Secretis characteres faciebat, Pictores ducenti et quinquaginta ex ciuibus pingebant, Fabri lignarii trecenti ex ciuibus extruebant, Michael Hillenius typis excudebat, Fides et Amor instigabant.20 Peter Gillis wrote it at the city’s behest, Cornelius Grapheus made the symbols from the Mysteries, 250 painters of the city painted it, 300 skilled carpenters of the city built it, Michael Hillen put it into print, Loyalty and Love motivated it. (My translation.)

Nevertheless, Gillis’s pamphlet describing the entry is unapologetically scholarly, making little concession to the broader audience of the entry. His erudition and delight in classical culture are evident throughout, and he happily conferred his learning on the city of Antwerp. His Latin text describes each of the allegorical tableaux vivants on the entry’s thirteen stages and includes a commentary on their themes, studded with references to ancient authorities. These notables include the ‘prudent Egyptians’ with their hieroglyphics; biblical authorities from the Old and New Testaments; the Church Fathers; and authors of Greek and Roman antiquity, especially Homer, Plato, and Cicero.21 The entry itself must also have been surprisingly literary. Although Gillis gives little indication of the style of the stage constructions (simply referred to as pegma, or ‘stages’), he records in detail the numerous Latin and Greek inscriptions with which they were decorated and concludes each description with a list of the names of the personifications appearing on them, first in Prims, ‘Het eigen werk’, pp. 30–31, 34–35, 36–37. The privilege by which Maximilian gave Antwerp the staple right for alum in 1491 underlines this connection with Antwerp’s loyalty during the Flemish Revolt: ‘Nous ont fait remontrer que de tout temps ils ont été bons et loyaux sujets sans jamais nous avoir été rebelles, et ont toujours tenu notre parti et querelle’. Prims, ‘Het eigen werk’, p. 42. 20 Part of the emphasis here on the city’s effort was no doubt also meant to draw attention to the great number of her own skilled workmen. 21 On the third stage, for instance, Gillis refers to ‘prudentes AEgyptii’. The closing verse at the end of the description assigns credit to Cornelius Grapheus for composing the symbols derived from sources on the Mysteries, presumably in reference to Egyptian hieroglyphics. See n. 19 above, with thanks to Martina Meyer for help with the Latin translation here and immediately below. 19

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Greek and then in Latin. These names were probably written on tablets held by the actors.22 In his account of the first stage, Gillis reproduces an inscription placed above the stage (in abaco) with some typographic specificity. It deliberately imitated the kind of inscriptions on Roman monuments that were beginning to be collected by contemporary antiquarians: ‘DIVO CAROLO IMP. CAES. OPT. MAX. semper Aug. P. P. Optatiss. felicibus auibus ex Hispaniis reduci S.  P.  Q. Antuerpien. gratulabundi posuere’ (‘To the divine Charles, Emperor, Best and Greatest Caesar, ever Augustus, Father of the Fatherland, on his return from Spain, a most welcome portent, the senate and people of Antwerp have held this celebration’). Here Charles was welcomed as a deified Roman emperor, and the city of Antwerp was re-imagined as his imperial capitol in the formula S.P.Q.A. that was later to grace the new classicizing city hall in the 1560s.23 Despite the flattery of Charles as a fitting successor to Emperor Augustus, the subsequent programme had an austere quality that owed more to scholarly discourses on good government than to the military victory celebrations of the Roman Empire.24 The entry programme can be summarized as a theatrical account of the advent of an ideal ruler called the Autocrator, a stand-in for Charles. The majority of the stages showed the Autocrator with a series of personified virtues defeating their corresponding vices. The first introductory tableau emphasized Antwerp’s constancy to her rulers: personifications of loyalty and love flanked a central vignette of the three graces joining the Genius Urbis Antverpiensis (‘Genius of the City of Antwerp’) in welcoming Charles and the other visitors to the city.25 In the commentary and in two separate inscriptions on the stage (one in Greek above and another in Latin below), Gillis emphasized that Fides and Amor, the Loyalty and Love of the city for her lord, were the source from which the entire entry ‘flowed’.26 This theme was reiterated in the very last line of the pamphlet and had also appeared on the title page, such that it served as the motto for the entry and for the city itself.27 Lest some might miss this point, ‘Fides et Amor’ was also inscribed on each subsequent stage. On the second stage, the Autocrator received a sword from the eagle of Jupiter, glossed by Gillis as showing that all sovereignty came from God and supported by both classical and biblical sources.28 The following stages were devoted to the qualities the Gillis makes explicit reference to name tablets in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew (!) held by the personifications of Fides and Amor on the first stage. On issues of staging, see Bussels, ‘Tableaux Vivants in Royal Entries, Renaissance and Baroque Painting and the Shifting Concept of Theatricality in the Southern Netherlands’, Art History, 33 (2010), 236–47. 23 To my knowledge, this is the earliest use of the formula S.P.Q.A. On Antwerp’s new city hall see Holm Bevers, Das Rathaus von Antwerpen, 1561–1565: Architektur Und Figurenprogramm (Hildesheim: Georg Ohme, 1985). 24 The programme seems less like a recreation of a Roman victory celebration, such as that by Mantegna in his monumental Triumphs of Caesar (1484–92), and more like an homage to the Psychomachia of Prudentius, with its battles between the vices and virtues. 25 Gillis’s choice of a classical male Genius made no concessions to the public popularity of the city Maid, Antwerpia. 26 The description of the first stage abounds with verbs suggesting ‘flow’, stating that ‘Fides et Amor, […] totius triumphi fontes collocabuntur’. The image recalls the triumphal motif of the fountain, which was included in displays by the Italian merchants in the 1515 Bruges entry and appearing again in the 1549 Antwerp entry, whose motto was ‘Fons irigans omnia’; see Kuyper, The Triumphant Entry, p. 18. 27 The full title with typographic emphasis is: HYPOTHESES SIVE ARGVMENTA SPECTACULORVM, QUAE Sereniss. & Invictissimo CAES. CAROLO Pio, Felici, Inclyto, semper AVG. praetor alia multa & varia FIDES ET AMOR celebratissime ciuitatis Antuerpiensis antistites (superis fauentibus) sunt edituri. In Cornelius Grapheus’s pamphlet of the 1549 entry, the motto ‘Fides et Amor’ is described as the long-standing device of the city in a discussion that emphasizes her constancy. See Kuyper, The Triumphant Entry, pp. 18–19. 28 Among others, Gillis quoted from Homer, ‘Rex unus cui sceptra dedit venerandaque iura Iuppiter’ (‘There is one king to whom Jupiter gave the sceptre and ancient laws’). The Illiad, trans. by A. T. Murray, Loeb Classical Library (London: W. Heinemann, 1925), B 204–06. 22

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city urged Charles to exercise in his reign. Together with the standard catalogue of rulers’ virtues such as piety, prudence, justice, clemency, and liberality, Gillis also included the more scholarly virtues of Philologia (‘Love of Learning’), and Philoponia (‘Diligence’). The series closed with a quartet of personifications: Glory, Victory, Honour, and Majesty, with their counterpart, Infamy, being crushed underfoot by the Autocrator and Glory. The twelfth stage showed the apotheosis of the Autocrator, who appeared seated amongst the stars and thus rewarded for his virtue. The final stage showed the earthly benefits of the advent of this supremely virtuous, ideal prince: the personified continents represented the world perfected and united in accepting the Autocrator’s rule. Most fundamentally, they represented the world at peace. The theme of peace on this last stage was made explicit by an additional vignette in which personified Peace defeated War, situated amidst the unfamiliar figures of Asia, Africa, and Europe. The personifications of war and peace would have been well-known for many in the audience, since the theme was a recurring one in the allegorical plays produced by civic rhetoricians and in other entry celebrations.29 For the literate members of the audience, a poem beneath the stage named the continents and interpreted the scene as the prophesied return of a golden age, with distinctly Virgilian overtones.30 Gillis had already prepared the way for this concluding vision of a renewed golden age with an allegory of justice on the fifth stage, featuring the return of the celestial virgin, Astraea. Together with the Autocrator, she appeared trampling a violent tyrant underfoot. Gillis’s text explained that this represented the hope that under Charles, nostro Caesare, a golden age would return and Astraea would again rule on earth.31 These borrowings from Virgil glorifying Emperor Augustus would have been easily understood by a classically educated audience as drawing a parallel between the reign of the first Roman emperor and that of Charles, just begun. The hope expressed was for a renewed Pax Augusta, recalling the time when the Mediterranean world was united under Roman law and Augustus was seen as Dominus Mundi. The figures of the three continents, Europe, Asia and Africa, were consistent with this imagined return of classical glory, embodying as they did the extent of Roman imperial authority in terms reminiscent of the geographical literature of antiquity.32 On the popularity of peace celebrations in Netherlandish urban communities, see Steven Gunn, ‘War and Identity in the Habsburg Netherlands, 1477–1559’, in Robert Stein and Judith Pollmann, Networks, Regions and Nations: Shaping Identities in the Low Countries (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 151–72, esp. p. 159. See also Gary K. Waite, Reformers on Stage: Popular Drama and Religious Propaganda in the Low Countries of Charles V, 1515–1556 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), Chapter 8, pp.  186–201; and Samuel Mareel, Voor vorst en stad: rederijkersliteratuur en vorstenfeest in Vlaanderen en Brabant 1432–1561 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010). 30 It also alluded to Christ’s prophesy of his universal ministry from John 10. 16, a prophesy long associated with the coming of the Last World Emperor and applied to Charles even before his imperial election: ‘Iam noua lux terris oritur, Pax alma redibit: | Et positis armis aurea secla fluent. | CAROLVS Europae Rector Libyamque Asiamque | Asseret imperio victor vbique suo, | Nunc implebuntur prudentum oracula vatum: | Grex vnus terris, Pastor et vnus erit.’ (‘Now will arise a new light on the earth, nourishing Peace will return: | A golden age will flow, the weapons laid aside. | CHARLES Ruler of Europe, both Libya and Asia he, | Victorious, will claim for his empire, | Now will be fulfilled the prophesy of the wise soothsayers: | The world shall be one flock, and there will be one shepherd’.) My translation. 31 Gillis, Hypotheses, n.p.: ‘Nam quemadmodum Astrea olim ferreo saeculo mortalium sceleribus offense, in coelum ad Iovem confugit, […] inta nunc sperandum est sub nostro Caesare Aurea saecula reditura, et Astraeam terries iterum dominaturam’. 32 It would, however, be overstating the case to say that the use of only three continents (ignoring the recognition of America as a ‘New World’ and as part of Charles’s realm) was a deliberate archaism conjuring up the mental landscape of ancient geographers. As many authors have pointed out, the discovery of America had a very uneven impact on Europe, not registering in most encyclopaedic endeavours until the middle of the sixteenth century. See the contributions in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 29

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The use of the personifications of the continents as an image of a golden age of peace was a completely novel reinterpretation of this familiar imperial theme.33 However, the 1520 entry wasn’t the first in the Netherlands in which the hope for a renewed golden age under Charles was expressed. It occurred twice in the 1515 Bruges entry: in the eighth city display sponsored by the tanners’ guild and in the display of the political body of the Franc of Bruges. In Cornelius Grapheus’s 1549 entry, the city’s arch on the Koepoortstraat again presented the three continents as the return of a golden age, with inscriptions alluding to Virgil’s Aeneid (vi. 794) and Georgics (i. 30).34 Invoking the return to a golden age was scarcely unusual, but it has generally been overlooked that the personified continents at the end of the 1520 entry were an entirely new image of that peaceful world order — one that was crafted on behalf of the city of Antwerp. The tacit assumption has been that this continental allegory was a predictable reprise of a subject long associated with the Roman — or the Holy Roman — Empire.35 However, in antiquity, personifications of Europe, Asia, and Africa never appeared together as a representation of the world or of the Empire. Asia and Africa were only personified individually (for example on coins) to refer to Roman provinces. With the exception of an isolated twelfth-century example, the Antwerp entry of 1520 thus contains the first continental allegory.36 Nonetheless, the very success of Gillis’s invention — its ubiquity in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century propaganda — has made the subject seem a natural vehicle for articulating imperialist ambitions.37 In fact, however, the continents were not adopted by imperial myth-makers until well after 1520. Until the publication of Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum in 1570, with its allegorical title page featuring the four continents, continental allegories appeared only in festivals in Antwerp: reprised in Cornelius Grapheus’s programme for the 1549 triumphal entry, and then four times in Antwerp’s ommegangen during the 1560s.38 It is in the Antwerp ommegangen, over forty years later, that the continental allegory first became the now-familiar quartet of figures (with the addition of the personification of America).39 Although the three continental figures were grouped peaceably together on the final stage of the 1520 entry, they were clearly differentiated: Europe and the Autocrator stood extending their arms for a mutual embrace, while Asia and Africa kneeled beside This formulation of the golden age theme has not been noted in the scholarship. Still, the most useful summary is Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1975), pp. 1–28. See also Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 34 On the inscriptions for this arch, see Kuyper, The Triumphant Entry, pp. 34, 332 n. 80. The previous stage also alluded to a new golden age (Kuyper, The Triumphant Entry, pp. 33–34). 35 McGrath, ‘Humanism’, pp. 53–55 is an exception. 36 The lone appearance — never repeated — of personifications of three continents on a pair of candlesticks made for Hildesheim Cathedral in the twelfth century has also not received any significant study. A recent summary of ancient Greek and Roman concepts of the continents, with illustrations, can be found in Michael Wintle, The Image of Europe: Visualizing Europe in Cartography and Iconography throughout the Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 81–102. 37 Interestingly, allegories of the four continents are later frequently paired with an apotheosis; in this too, Gillis’s formulation proved to be ground-breaking. 38 On Ortelius’s continental allegory, see Elisabeth Neumann, ‘Imagining European Community on the Title Page of Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570)’, Word & Image, 25  (2009), 427–42, with further references. On the 1549 Antwerp entry, see Bussels, Spectacle, Rhetoric and Power. For the ommegangen of the 1560s, see Emily Jo Peters, ‘Den gheheelen loop des weerelts (The Whole Course of the World): Printed Processions and the Theater of Identity in Antwerp during the Dutch Revolt’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of California at Santa Barbara, 2005), with particular attention to the prints that echo their themes. Prints of the four continents by Gerard van Groeningen and Maarten de Vos post-date 1570. 39 Only McGrath, ‘Humanism’, p. 52, emphasizes the Antwerp context of the first continental allegories and points out that their adoption elsewhere was delayed. 33

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them. Their kneeling position was explained by the defeat of Moslem powers, signified proleptically by two soldiers flanking the stage who held aloft the severed heads of an Ottoman and a ‘Magmed’ on their spears. These trophies referred to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire to the east of the Mediterranean and of the Ottoman client states in North Africa, respectively. The continents of Asia and Africa represented the peoples of those regions, who were understood to have been freed from Moslem ‘tyranny’.40 They were characterized as matronae (‘matrons’) in foreign dress, while Europe was a beautiful virgin, ‘never having succumbed to Jove’ — or to Islam.41 In the 1549 entry, the continents Asia and Africa also represented regions and cities freed from the ‘tyrannical’ Ottoman Empire, as Grapheus made explicit in his commentary.42 In 1549, the continental arch was followed by a separate display devoted to the routing of the Turks that was topped by a giant crest with Charles V’s device of ‘Plus Oultre’. In contrast, the 1520 entry made little concession to the crusading ideals enshrined in that device, which had been adopted by Charles only four years earlier.43 The subject of the victory over the Turks was relegated to the sides of the stage, as part of the setting for the central allegory, and gave little impetus for imagining chivalric deeds.44 It was, however, from the rhetoric urging a renewed crusade against the Moslem enemies of Christendom that Gillis probably derived his use of the continents in this display. Although little used elsewhere, in Reichstagreden since the Fall of Constantinople (1453), papal and imperial orators alike had seized upon the idea of the world as composed of three continents to dramatize the threat to an embattled continent of ‘Europe’, a small remnant of Christendom, facing much larger forces of Islam in ‘Asia’ and ‘Africa’.45 The intention behind this usage was to underline the urgency for all Christian princes to unite in the cause of war against the Turks. What Gillis borrowed from this tradition was the association of the term ‘Europe’ with the need for peace within Christendom.46 The depicted defeat of Moslem enemies and the subsequent submission of Asia and Africa to the Autocrator’s rule were the result of this European peace. Finally, lest Charles should see this continental tableau as an endorsement of his crusading and territorial aspirations, a Greek motto above the stage pointedly directed his attention away from any military ambitions to acquire more territories and reminded him of his duties to those whom he already governed: ‘μν ελαχες σπαρταμ κοσμα σω’, with its Latin translation provided in Gillis’s pamphlet as ‘Spartam nactus es, hanc orna’ (‘Sparta is Moslem ‘tyranny’ became the standard derogatory epithet in the literature on the ‘Turkish menace’ in the sixteenth century, replacing an earlier emphasis on Turkish ‘barbarity’. For analysis of the major motifs of European Turcica in the Renaissance, see Almut Höfert, Den Feind Beschreiben: ‘Türkengefahr’ und Europäisches Wissen Über Das Osmanische Reich 1450–1600 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2003). 41 ‘[V]irginem pulcherrimam et a Jove intactam complectetur’, Gillis, Hypotheses, n.p. 42 In his commentary on the arch of the Koepoortstraat, Grapheus explained that the personified cities and regions shown as captives of Moslem powers in the following tableau on the Melkmarkt appeared as liberated continents and willing subjects of Prince Philip: ‘Illic vero adhuc captivae Barbarorum tyrannide liberari orant’ (‘Freed from the tyranny of the Barbarians’, p. K 5v). See Kuyper, The Triumphant Entry, p. 30. 43 Earl Rosenthal, ‘Plus Ultra, Non Plus Ultra, and the Columnar Device of Emperor Charles V’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 34 (1971), 204–28; and Rosenthal, ‘The Invention of the Columnar Device of Emperor Charles V at the Court of Burgundy in Flanders in 1516’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 36 (1973), 198–230. 44 The image of severed heads on the tips of spears seems disturbingly visceral amongst the otherwise more chaste displays. 45 The most famous speeches in this context are those of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II. They were familiar to Erasmus, as shown in his De bello Turcis inferendo (1530). 46 See Dieter Mertens, ‘Europäischer Friede und Türkenkrieg im Spätmittelalter’, in Zwischenstaatliche friedenswahrung in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. by Heinz Duchhardt (Cologne: Böhlau-Verlag, 1991), pp. 45–90 (p. 52). Höfert, Den Feind Beschreiben, pp. 62–68. 40

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your portion, do your best for her’). The use of this motto was doubtless inspired by Erasmus’s Adagia (ii. v. 1): in the revised edition of 1515, this was one of two adages to which Erasmus added a passionate anti-war polemic. In this longer commentary, Erasmus recommended that the motto be inscribed on the walls of the palaces of all princes, and Gillis seems to have taken this very much to heart. There is yet another way of understanding the contrasting roles of the three continents here — one suggested by the history of civic revolts, particularly by Ghent and Bruges, in the mid-fifteenth century. The kneeling figures of Asia and Africa recall the amendes honorables (ritual ceremonies of punishment) imposed upon the rebellious cities by the victorious Duke Philip the Good (1396–1467). His defeated subjects were required to kneel before him and to beg forgiveness in a theatrical ritual of penitence.47 The unwavering loyalty of the city of Antwerp (the very motto of the entry celebration) thus likened Antwerp to Europe, and the quasi-matrimonial embrace between virgin Europe and the Autocrator served as an idealized vision of Antwerp’s relationship with her sovereign. It is likely that much of the Antwerp audience in 1520 understood the continental display as an image of exemplary government, since this gesture of embrace between ruler and ruled was a mainstay of political allegory. Further, this was the only stage on which there was any example of good government provided for Charles to emulate, although such exempla were a standard feature of both triumphal entries and Mirror for Princes treatises. The mutual embrace of the Autocrator and Europe showed the successful outcome of the entry celebration: the renewal of Antwerp’s affective bond with Charles, hoped for in the opening display of the three graces: ‘ac gratia […] gratiam pariat’ (‘for favour […] brings forth favour’). There is an additional detail of the continental tableau that also deserves to be noted: Europe is described as extending a cross to a personification of Greece. Most directly, this alludes to the crusading ambitions of both emperors and popes to recover Greece and Constantinople from the Turks. However, I want to consider this connection between Europe and Greece in light of what must surely have been the entry’s most arresting feature — at least for the literate portion of its contemporary audience — yet receives scant attention in the scholarship: each stage was inscribed with a prominent Greek motto, located above the tableau and rendered in Greek script. Various Latin inscriptions also appeared beneath the stages. This prominent display of Greek is unique in the corpus of Netherlandish civic entries.48 Gillis’s pamphlet also gave these mottos great emphasis, reproducing them using Greek type and helpfully providing a Latin translation. The personifications of the virtues and vices were all given Greek names, and these, too, were printed in Greek, even within the body of Gillis’s Latin commentaries. They included the unusually scholarly virtue of Philologia (‘Love of Learning’), who defeated Barbaries (‘Barbarians’) and the Apaedeusia (‘Ill-educated’), explained by Gillis as ‘procacitas linguae Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, pp. 34–37. The most interesting use of Greek in a later entry was in Jan Otho’s humanist, even philological, programme for the Ghent entry of Charles V and Prince Philip in 1549. A sequence of five triumphal arches featured historicizing inscriptions, progressing diachronically from Hebrew on the first, to Greek, Latin, Old High German, and Medieval Flemish on subsequent arches. Two of the Greek inscriptions are taken from Agapetus’s Ekthesis, possibly inspired by Gillis’s earlier use of them in Antwerp in 1520. See Markus Stock, ‘Diachronic Topography: The Old High German Inscriptions for the Entry of Prince Philip of Spain into Ghent (1549)’, in Topographies of the Early Modern City, ed. by Arthur Groos, Hans-Jochen Schiewer, and Markus Stock: Transatlantic Studies, 3 (Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2008), pp. 139–60. While in many other ways drawing on Gillis’s 1520 entry, Grapheus’s 1549 Antwerp entry programme used Greek sparingly, mostly for selected terms in his detailed explanatory texts, for instance see Kuyper, The Triumphant Entry, p. 36.

47 48

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qualem habent’ (‘those having brash speech’) and drawing attention to linguistic skills in particular. Gillis pointedly omitted the more martial virtues of fortitude and valour. The presence of Latin on the stages evoked imperial Rome, but to understand the prominence of Greek in the entry, it is necessary to look at Gillis’s sources. Eight of the thirteen Greek mottos were taken from a sixth-century Byzantine Mirror for Princes by a Deacon Agapetus, written for and dedicated to Emperor Justinian (r. 527–65), likely at the beginning of his reign. Agapetus is known only for this advice treatise on imperial governance, and since much of its political theory is derivative — indebted to Isocrates, Eusebius, Isidore, and the Church Fathers Basil and Gregory — most scholarship has focused on his sources.49 Agapetus’s treatise saw a revival of interest in the sixteenth century when it often served as a school text for studying Greek. Over sixty printed editions, commentaries, and translations were produced during the century — the earliest in Venice in 1509 and others in Cologne and Louvain in 1517 — each in Greek with Latin translations.50 Although nearly forgotten today, Agapetus’s Ekthesis, a book of seventy-two short chapters of precepts for guiding the Emperor Justinian, was popular not merely for its aphoristic style; it was also valued for its political content. In 1520, the Greek text had only just begun to be more widely available and it is a testament to Gillis’s scholarly interests that he was familiar with it. Gillis may, in fact, have been introduced to it by Erasmus, who is certain to have known it.51 An edition of Agapetus prepared by Petrus Mosellanus (Peter Schade, 1493– 1524), a professor of Greek and later rector at the University of Leipzig, sheds interesting light on Gillis’s use of this text in the entry.52 In his dedication to Duke Georg of Saxony, dated February 1520, Mosellanus listed the most important ancient writers on good government: Solomon for his Proverbs; Xenophon, for his Education of Cyrus; and especially Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, and Cicero. He then praised Erasmus’s Mirror for Princes, the Institutio principis christiani (1516), as equalling or surpassing these by encompassing the entire subject in one book. Further, he recommended Agapetus’s little treatise to rulers short of leisure for reading because it compressed Erasmus’s arguments into shorter

Reviewed in Peter N. Bell, Three Political Voices from the Age of Justinian. Agapetus, ‘Advice to the Emperor’; ‘Dialogue on Political Science’; Paul the Silentiary, ‘Description of Hagia Sophia’ (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), pp. 28–32. 50 The first published edition was by Zacharias Callierges, while he was still in Venice in 1509. See Nicolas Barker, Aldus Manutius and the Development of Greek Script & Type in the Fifteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), p. 74. The Cologne edition was published by Eucharius Ceroicorus in 1517. Agapetus’s short treatise enjoyed its greatest distribution as part of a compilation of Greek texts (with Latin translations on the facing recto) used in language instruction that featured fables by Aesop and others, comic epics including the Batrachomyomachia attributed to Homer, Musaeus’s Ero and Leandro, and the Galeomyomachia by a twelfth-century Byzantine monk. In addition to a string of editions published in Basel by Froben and his successors beginning in 1518, the collection was also published in Louvain in 1517 by Dirk Martens. A new Latin translation by Petrus Mosellanus was published in early 1520. For a summary of the reception history of Agapetus, see Bell, Three Political Voices, p. 27. 51 A copy of the compilation with Aesop’s fables published by Froben in 1518 was bound with part of Erasmus’s Parabolis sive similia, also published by Froben that year. Both publications served obvious educational purposes. See Bell, Three Political Voices, p. 27. 52 Petrus Mosellanus, D.  Agapeti Sanctae Constantinopolitanae Ecclesiae Diaconi, Ad Justinianum Caesarum Augustum opusculum boni principis officia brevibus sententiis complectens (Leipzig: Schumann, 1520). Mosellanus was in correspondence with Erasmus from 1517. For a brief biographical outline, see Michael Erbe, ‘Petrus Mosellanus’, in Contemporaries of Erasmus, ii, pp.  466–67; see also Ihor Ševčenko, ‘Agapetus East and West: The Fate of a Byzantine “Mirror of Princes”’, in State and Society in Europe from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century: Proceedings of the Fist Conference of Polish and American Historians, May 27–29, 1974, ed. Jaroslaw Pelenski (Warsaw: Warsaw University Press, 1981), pp.  15–48; and Wim François, ‘Ad divinarum rerum cognitionem: Petrus Mosellanus and Jacobus Latomus on Biblical or Scholastic Theology’, Renaissance and Reformation, 29 (2005), 13–47. 49

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maxims: ‘[I]dem argumentum paucis eisque brevibus sententii complectens’.53 What could be more fitting for the instruction of the young emperor-elect, on his way to Aachen and greater responsibilities? Gillis’s choice of Agapetus’s Ekthesis as a source for his entry went beyond endorsing Erasmus’s pacifist political ideals, however. The connection with Mosellanus suggests a more polemical purpose behind the prominence of Greek on the stages. Mosellanus published the Agapetus just after he found himself on the front lines of an attack on the teaching of Greek and Hebrew as necessary prerequisites for the study of theology. At stake was the role of biblical textual scholarship as practiced by Erasmus — that is, based on the knowledge of the ‘unmuddied sources’, be they in Greek, Hebrew, or Latin.54 The attack was launched by a colleague of Erasmus’s at Louvain, the theologian Jacobus Latomus ( Jacques Masson, 1475–1544) in his De trium linguarum et studii theologici ratione, which was published by Michael Hillen in Antwerp in 1519 as a response to Mosellanus’s 1518 De variarum linguarum congnitione paranda oratio.55 Erasmus himself quickly replied to this offensive in the Apologia contra Latomi dialogum, also published in Antwerp in 1519, by Thibault. This dispute famously escalated, and Erasmus put much effort into finding protectors, especially at court, who might silence his opponents. It is against the backdrop of a shared conviction in the importance of Greek and the defence of the recently founded Collegium Trilingue at Louvain that we should see Gillis’s prominent use of Greek mottos on the stages — mottos taken from a Greek Mirror for Princes that was championed by Mosellanus as quintessentially Erasmian. By inscribing these Greek maxims in such a prominent position on the stages of the entry, Gillis was aligning the city with the cause of humanist letters. Part of the audience of the event must have understood the polemical intent behind the Greek inscriptions very well and launched an attack, since Gillis’s vociferous defence of his language expertise occupies almost the entirety of his preface to the reader. Gillis left no doubt that he considered his opponents to belong to the Barbaries and Apaedeusia, calling them inept and unlearned — ‘barbaris literis assueti’ (‘having become accustomed to barbaric letters’) — a recurring humanist critique of scholastic theologians. The 1520 entry was unusual for its omission of some key features; decorations for other entries presented a re-envisioned city to the visiting sovereign, displaying its corporate structures, its industry and trade, and highlights of its history under past rulers. In 1520, representations of Antwerp were curiously absent from the pageantry. Instead, the city offered Charles generic, universally valid advice on good government. One might say, however, that Antwerp was presented not as the subject of the entry displays but rather as the author of them. Gillis’s entry characterized Antwerp as well-versed in the languages and the political wisdom of classical antiquity and hence as a qualified instructor for Charles.56 It was certainly no accident that ‘Fides et Amor’, the motto of the city and the fonts of the city’s welcome of Charles, was inscribed above each of the thirteen stages in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, the trium linguarum of the Louvain Collegium.57 Greek 53 Mosellanus, D.  Agapeti, Aiiv–Aiiir. A  summary of this dedication is given by Ševčenko, ‘Agapetus East and West’, pp. 26–27 n. 44. 54 François, ‘Ad divinarum rerum cognitionem’, pp. 16–17. 55 Mosellanus, Oratio de variorum linguarum cognition paranda (Leipzig: Schumann, 1518). For further bibliography, see François, ‘Ad divinarum rerum cognitionem’, p. 36 n. 13. 56 Agapetus’s Ekthesis, after all, was used to teach Greek as well as for political advice. 57 Grapheus, in 1550, emphasizes this feature of the 1520 displays, specifying the presence of all three ancient languages (Kuyper, The Triumphant Entry, pp. 18–19).

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Fig. 1: Title page, Pieter Gillis, Hypotheses sive argumenta spectaculorum (Antwerp: Michael Hillen, 1520). Source: Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: A:217.1.

l­ etters, displayed on all the stages and prominent in the pamphlet account, were of primary importance for the portrayal of the city: like the figure of Europe, Antwerp unequivocally and ostentatiously turned to Greek as part of her identity. Indeed, on the pamphlet’s title page itself, the importance of the form of the letters is intimated: the title words are rendered in the shape of a goblet, to serve as a gift presented by Antwerp to Charles (Figure 1). 145

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It remains to be considered what audiences of the 1520 entry celebrations might have made of this very scholarly presentation. The event was designed specifically as a celebration of Charles’s imperial election and was held just a month before his coronation as emperor-elect at Aachen.58 It is difficult to know what the expectations of the various constituencies of the audience might have been, but the fact that this was not an inaugural entry must have been significant, particularly from the perspective of the city’s citizens, for whom the constitutional aspect of such joyous entries (guaranteeing civic privileges) was most important.59 The surprising features of Gillis’s programme: the prominence of classical languages; the lack of references to the city; and the exclusively allegorical programme (omitting any historical references), must have contributed to the impression that the city was welcoming a successor of Emperor Augustus. This may well have seemed appropriate to others besides the civic elites.60 For educated observers, and perhaps especially for those of Charles’s court, the display of Latin and Greek portrayed the city as uniquely qualified to be an imperial councillor as Charles faced his new responsibilities, rather than as a mere supplicant for his attention. As loyal advisor to Charles, Antwerp sought to lead the young emperor in the same direction that Netherlandish cities urged upon their rulers repeatedly in entries during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: the path of peace. Despite the novelty of the allegorical programme and of the continental tableau at its culmination, this familiar message would have been clear to most viewers and participants. Finally, the embrace between the Autocrator and the figure of Europe was offered as a model for Charles and all his subjects — in Antwerp and beyond — of the affective, reciprocal bonds that constitute ideal sovereignty. ‘Being European’ in Antwerp, as Gillis first defined it in 1520, meant being well governed and united in peace.

There are unfortunately no extant descriptions of Charles’s 1515 triumphal entry into Antwerp. There is however a celebratory book probably published in connection with this occasion, titled Lofzangen ter ere van Keizer Maximiliaan en zijn zoon Karel den Vijfde (Antwerp: Jan de Gheet, 1515) and containing two state motets in tribute to Charles. See Annelies Wouters and Eugeen Schreurs, ‘Het bezoek van keizer Maximiliaan en de Blijde Intrede van aartshertog Karel (Antwerpen, 1508–15)’, Musica Antiqua, 12/2  (1995): 100–10; and Mary Tiffany Ferer, Music and Ceremony at the Court of Charles V: The Capilla Flamenca and the Art of Political Promotion (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), pp. 160–67, with further references. 59 Thøfner, A Common Art, pp. 40, 51–57. 60 Regarding the 1520 entry, the Antwerpsch chronykje records that ‘veele schooner triumphen bedreven warden, men thoonde die Personagien drie dagen lanck d’welck seer schoon waren’ (‘many beautiful triumphs were shown, the allegories were shown for three days and were very beautiful’). For the 1549 entry, the chronicle expresses a similar satisfaction that it occurred ‘met grooten triumphe’ (‘with great triumph’), F. G. V., Antwerpsch Chronykje, in het welk zeer veele enelderste tevergeefsch gezogte geschiedenissen, sedert den jare 1500. tot het jaar 1574 (Leiden: Pieter vander Eyk, 1743), pp. 14, 48. 58

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‘Restored Behaviour’ and the Performance of the City Maiden in Joyous Entries into Antwerp* Stijn Bussels and Bram Van Oostveldt Leiden University Leiden University/ University of Amsterdam

During the past two decades, one of the main issues for debate in the field of performance studies has been the question of whether or not ephemerality is the fundamental ontology of performance.1 Although the problem of the transitory nature of the performative or theatrical event has a long genealogy, we propose that the current debate is fruitful with regards to social rituals and cultural performances in the early modern period.2 In this paper, we will therefore bring Richard Schechner’s concept of performance as ‘restored behaviour’ to the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century spectacle — and, more particularly, to the study of the tableaux vivants used during joyous entries in the Low Countries. The concept of restored behaviour gives us an opportunity to think of joyous entries as performative events that exceed their merely ephemeral characteristics, but that are always inscribed within a larger complex of tradition and change, repetition and uniqueness, persistence and renewal. To make this claim, it is necessary to briefly outline the debate on the ephemerality of performance and how Schechner’s notion of restored behaviour has contributed to a deeper understanding of performance, its effects, and its possible afterlife. Does a Performance Disappear or Remain? With the growing influence, since the 1980s, both of performance studies and of anthropological interest in performance as it relates to social rituals, the ephemeral and unique character of the performative event has been considered the fundamental ontology of performance. This places performance studies within a ‘presentist’ paradigm. In her influential book, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Peggy Phelan states that performance only exists in a ‘maniacally charged present’ and that ‘performance’s being becomes itself through disappearance’.3 This emphasis on ephemerality has two consequences. First, the elusiveness of performance means that a performance This contribution is funded by the European Research Council starting grant program ‘Elevated Minds. The Sublime in the Public Arts in Seventeenth-Century Paris and Amsterdam’. 1 For an overview of this debate, see Frederik Leroy, ‘Verknoopte tijd, verfrommelde geschiedenis’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Ghent, 2012), pp. 32–41. 2 On this genealogy, see Christopher Balme, Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2008), pp. 12–19, 31–35. 3 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 148. *

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 147-166. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114006

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can never be saved, captured, recorded, or documented. When this is attempted, the performance is merely turned into a representation of itself.4 Second, it is precisely in this ephemerality that performance seems to find its subversive and transgressive nature. Because performance has no enduring characteristics, it can never be turned into an object. Thus, according to Phelan, it is the event par excellence that resists fixation and commodification. Performance theorists have often emphasized the transgressive, transformative, and subversive power of artistic and social performances.5 This has much to do with the fact that performance theorists have, for quite some time, departed from a reading of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner’s ideas of performance as ritual. Instead, recent scholarship has focused on ritual as a rite de passage and on the notion of liminality as a profoundly transgressive moment that changes social, cultural, and even political identities.6 Performance is not necessarily always about transformation and contestation, however: it can equally be the place where continuity is affirmed. In the last decade, this idea has come to the fore to profoundly challenge the presentist paradigm from two fields of research: gender studies and memory studies. In this more complex and broader discussion, Judith Butler’s instrumentalization of performativity as citational, and of the reiterative forces constituting gender roles, has been of particular importance. As a historical construct, gender is not the natural expression of a unique self; instead, it is an embodied performance of historical gender roles through a practice of citation, rehearsal, and reiteration.7 Performance and performativity are not exclusively thought of as the moment of transgression and resistance that is framed within the structure of liminality, but they are now equally seen as normative sites of repetition, continuation, and tradition. In performances, social and cultural identities are re-enacted and represented according to an already existing ‘script’ or ‘scenario’. ‘Script’ or ‘scenario’ should be understood here as the basic plotline that sets the stage for the performance and demarcates its boundaries, but within the limits of which there is always the possibility of change and alteration. In this dialectic between tradition and transformation, performance can be understood as a moment of negotiation. The idea of performance as mediation or transmission has been influenced to a similar extent by the boom in memory studies since the late 1980s. In the work of Pierre Nora as well as of Jan and Aleida Assmann, the notion of cultural memory is regarded as the stylized operations (memory figures) through which individual and collective pasts are consolidated in the present. Again, the notion of performance has become increasingly important for memory studies. In How Societies Remember (1989), Paul Connerton states that historical knowledge is not only transferred by written or material documents, but is Phelan, Unmarked, pp. 146–49. Leroy, ‘Verknoopte tijd’, p. 34. The focus of performance studies on ritual, cultural performance, and artistic performance as sites of contestation should also be seen in light of the discipline’s emergence in the performance avant-garde of the late 1970s and 1980s, and its predominant alliance with the left, progressive, and liberal sector of the political spectrum. This is especially the case for the United States of America, where performance theorists — along with performance artists — rose up against the ultra-conservative cultural politics of the Reagan administration. Cf.  John McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 50–51; and Leroy, ‘Verknoopte tijd’, p. 34, n. 105. 7 Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Gender Consitution’, Theatre Journal, 40/4 (1988), pp. 511–25 (p. 523); Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993; repr. 2011), pp. xv–xxiv; and Leroy, ‘Verknoopte tijd’, pp. 36–39. 4 5 6

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equally constituted by ‘bodily’ and ‘incorporated’ practices, ranging from the practices of everyday life and rituals to artistic performances that leave no direct material traces.8 In performance studies, this claim regarding the performative aspect of cultural memory has contributed to the problematization of the discipline’s presentist paradigm. Diana Taylor, for instance, has stated that the shift from discursive knowledge (‘archive’) to performative knowledge (‘repertoire’) can expand our understanding of the past to a great extent, meaning that ‘performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory and a sense of identity through processes of reiteration’.9 Cultural memory is equally important in Marvin Carlson’s study of the theatre as a ‘memory machine’ that reactivates the topos of memory theatre and testifies to the complex and deep relations between theatre and cultural memory.10 Theatre can be seen as a ‘repository of cultural memory’ in all its different constituent parts (play, actor, audience, production, and location). But, Carlson continues, ‘like the memory of each individual, it is subject to continual adjustment and modification as the memory is recalled in new circumstances and contexts. The present experience is always ghosted by previous experiences and associations while these ghosts are simultaneously shifted and modified by the process of recycling and shifting’.11 This questioning of the ‘spectral’ character of a theatre that is always haunted by previous performances has paved the way to thinking of theatre and performance and their possible afterlives.12 Restored Behaviour and Entries Butler’s problematization of performance and performativity — as a moment of negotiation between transgression and repetition or continuation — and Carlson’s understanding of theatre — as a form of continuously modified and adjusted cultural memory — both align well with Richard Schechner’s definition of performance as ‘twice behaved behaviour’ or ‘restored behaviour’. Schechner defines restored behaviour as the basic underlying structure of all performative events, from theatrical performances and rituals to social performances and behaviours. No performance, however new and groundbreaking it may appear to be, is ever entirely original, for it always consists of forms of previous behaviour. Restored behaviour can consist of ‘actions marked off by aesthetic convention, as in theatre, dance and music; it can be actions reified into the “rules of Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 72–75. Many thanks to Herman Roodenburg for making us aware of the relevance of this study to our article. 9 Diana Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 2–3. 10 Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: Theatre as a Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001). On the topos of memory theatre, see Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 11 Carlson, The Haunted Stage, p. 2. 12 The notion of theatre as having a spectral quality of course emerges primarily from Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx: L’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1993), which paved the way to the framing of theatre and performance as ‘hauntology’. Most recently, theatre’s possible afterlife has been conceptualized in relation to Aby Warburg’s notion of Nachleben and Pathosformel in Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Les Editions Minuit, 2002); Didi-Huberman, Atlas ou le gai savoir inquiet: L’oeil de l’histoire 3 (Paris: Les Editions Minuit, 2011); and Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 27–39, 147–68. See also Lisa Skwirblies, Affective Archives: On the Politics of Critical Re-Enactment and Historical Experience (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Amsterdam and Warwick University, 2013). 8

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the game”, “etiquette”, or diplomatic “protocol”’.13 Restored behaviour derives from that which has been enacted before, but the concept also encompasses renewal. Schechner states that restored behaviour is ‘marked, framed, and separate’; therefore, it ‘can be worked on, stored, and recalled, played with, made into something else, transmitted and transformed’. This broader understanding of performative acts as existing in relation to other such acts has shifted the presentist paradigm that sees performance as a single, unique, and ephemeral event; the current notion of performative events as cultural and social expressions exposes a dialectic between tradition and renewal, remembering and forgetting, and remaining and disappearing. Schechner’s notion of restored behaviour can be applied productively to the study of rituals in the early modern period. As already indicated, we will concentrate on the joyous entry, a political ritual that performed the inauguration of a new ruler or governor. The incoming ruler or governor swore to respect the city’s privileges; in exchange, the municipality re-affirmed the subjection of itself and all its citizens to the central power. This mutual oath-taking functioned as the climax of a group of performances and displays (tableaux vivants, triumphal arches, parades, tournaments, etc.) through which the organizing municipality presented its view of the power dynamic between the city and the central power. This presentation had to be performed with the utmost care: the organizers had to honour the incoming ruler or governor while simultaneously seizing the opportunity to publicly present a list of civic wishes. Considering joyous entries as a combined set of restored behaviours allows us to take a closer look at the carefully constructed discourses that were enacted during entries, making it possible to embed these performances and displays in a more precise historical framework, tracing a particular entry from its historical precedent through its afterlife. As such, employing this theoretical framework contributes to a better understanding of a performance’s enduring effects and of the agencies that transcend the transitory nature of the actual event. As we shall see, this is evidenced in the restaging, adaptation, and modification in joyous entries of certain tableaux vivants, with their allegorical figures and their ritual gestures and movements. Although these modifications appear within dramatically changing historical contexts and serve different ideologies and political agendas, the entries often work as palimpsests which reveal and retrace intimate — but often unanticipated — relations. This brings us to a second way in which the concept of restored behaviour can be helpful in revisiting sixteenth-century joyous entries. With its emphasis on continuity and modification, restored behaviour shows us how the entries successfully functioned as specific mnemonic devices, which not only materialize the sixteenth-century’s renewed interest in the ancient art of memory but also display it for larger audiences. Entries manifested as huge and mobile theatres of memory which spread throughout the entire city. In their use and reuse of certain figures, motifs, and gestures in tableaux vivants and other devices, entries displayed their particular genealogies, producing and reinforcing a sense of tradition that could soften the experience of turmoil resulting from political and religious changes. It is important to note that these genealogies were not only performed during the entries

13

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Richard Schechner, Performance Studies (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 45.

‘Restored Behaviour’ and the Performance of the City Maiden in Joyous Entries Restored intoBehaviour Antwerp*

themselves, but that their afterlife was ensured by their visual and textual description in official printed accounts.14 We will show that early modern joyous entries and their tableaux vivants should be viewed within a complex matrix of tradition and change by focusing on the performance of the Maid of Antwerp, Antverpia. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century entries into Antwerp, the figure of Antverpia was time and again staged in the very first tableau vivant seen by the new ruler or governor as his procession came into the city. Near the entry gate she stood, either frozen in one specific gesture or making only minimal movements. Kneeling or bowing, the figure of Antverpia allegorically emphasized the city’s submission to the new ruler or governor. However, deviations from previous performances of Antverpia — such as the details of her costume or the personifications accompanying her — made it possible to press, subtly but publicly, conditions on the ruler or governor in exchange for civic obedience. Thus the very beginning of this political ritual made explicit its essential purpose: Antverpia performed a carefully constructed discourse, one which both honoured the new ruler or governor and presented him with a list of civic wishes. Joyous Entries in Antwerp between 1549 and 1635 To clarify the multi-layered expression of Antwerp’s political agenda through Antverpia’s pageant, we will look at joyous entries performed in the city between 1549 and 1635, primarily by reference to illustrations from the official accounts. Of course, the illustrations in these accounts give us no direct access to the actual performances themselves. Nevertheless, each one can be used as a visual document that testifies in another medium to the entry’s existence.15 Since these accounts were illustrated by artists who were closely related to the city government, and who were also often involved in the organization of the entries, the illustrations provide us with insight into the organizers’ political and other agendas.16 Moreover, those organizing later entries read the accounts of previous entries when creating their own, meaning that we can also gain some idea of how previous performances had been emulated or otherwise engaged through an analysis of these official accounts. The intricate relationship between entry as performative event and entry as discursive material or visual document can be seen in light of what Lina Bolzoni describes as early modernity’s equilibrium between the oral and performative art of memory and memory’s increasing fixation in durable form through the emergence of the printing press. As such, joyous entries (seen as forms of restored behaviour) take central positions at the intersection of oral memory and fixed memory. See Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory, Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. xviii–xix. 15 By using these visual documents as sources examining joyous entries into Antwerp during this period, we are contributing to a body of research that has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves within the field of early modern festivities in the Low Countries. This interest culminated in the workshop ‘Récit et expérience de la fête au premier âge moderne’, which was held in the Palais des Académies (Brussels, 24 May 2013) in the context of the inter-university research project Cultures du Spectacle Baroque entre Italie et anciens Pays-Bas, organized by Ralph Dekoninck, Maarten Delbeke, Annick Delfosse, and Koen Vermeir, who plan to edit a volume on the performance and print accounts of joyous entries and related festivities. See also Picturing Performance: The Iconography of Performing Arts in Concepts and Practice, ed. by Thomas F. Heck (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1999), pp. 7–41. 16 See, among others, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, ‘Festival Books in Europe from Renaissance to Rococo’, The Seventeenth Century, 3 (1988), 181–201; and Watanabe-O’Kelly, ‘Early Modern European Festivals: Politics and Performance, Event and Record’, in Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance, ed. by Ronnie Mulryne and Elizabeth Goldring (London: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 15–25. Most recently, Anne-Laure Van Bruaene clarified that it is crucial to consider the accounts of the entries of François d’Anjou as cultural objects ‘that themselves played an essential role in the construction of the events, often in a very subtle way’. Van Bruaene, ‘Spectacle and Spin for a Spurned Prince: Civic Strategies in the Entry Ceremonies of the Duke of Anjou in Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent (1582)’, Journal of Early Modern History, 11  (2007), 263–84 (p. 273). 14

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The first joyous entry we will discuss is that of Charles  V and Prince Philip in 1549. This entry formed part of the careful preparation for the transfer of power from father to son, such that the power of the Habsburg dynasty was performed as a natural continuity, wherein the prince appeared next to the emperor as the evident supporter of Antwerp’s well-being. The citizens of Antwerp, in turn, were characterized as Habsburg subjects whose loyalty was directly related to their prosperity. The next entry, that of François d’Anjou in 1582, occurred under much different circumstances, given that it was a direct act of hostility towards the Habsburgs.18 Anjou’s appointment as the new Duke of Brabant meant that Philip was no longer recognized as sovereign and this began an open revolt against him.19 This atmosphere of defiance prompted an assertive performance of Antwerp’s self-confidence. The depiction of Antverpia was presented on a pageant wagon, a format appropriated from procession culture. We will discuss how this significant change in the political ritual clarified the growing urge of Antwerp’s Calvinist municipality to strengthen its display of autonomy and intractability. Subsequent entries into Antwerp were performed after the Habsburg re-conquest of the southern territories by Ernest of Austria in 1594,20 by Albert and Isabella in 1599,21 and by Don Ferdinand in 1653.22 These entries served to enforce the power of the Spanish crown so, from the outset, the performed submission of Antverpia was once again crucial. Nevertheless, it was not the tableau vivant from the previous Habsburg entry of 1549 that was chosen to serve as precedent; strikingly, it was Antverpia’s pageant of 1582 that was reused. Calvinist strategy was thus appropriated to honour the Habsburgs — the sworn enemy — but, as we shall see, the personifications accompanying the Maid were adapted to the new political situation. 17

Antverpia at the Start We begin our discussion of the performance of Antverpia with an illustration from the official account of François d’Anjou’s entry into Antwerp in 1582 (Figure  1). The illustration shows Anjou just before he passes through the Emperor’s Gate, which had been Cornelius Grapheus, Spectaculorum in susceptione Philippi […] (Antwerp: Gillis van Diest, 1550). For the most recent publication on this entry, including an extended bibliography, see Stijn Bussels, Spectacle, Rhetoric and Power: The Triumphal Entry of Prince Philip of Spain into Antwerp (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012). 18 La Joyeuse & magnifique entrée de Monseigneur François […] (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1582). A facsimile edition is available under the same title with an introduction by Helen Purkis (Amsterdam: Theatrum Urbis Terrarum, 1973). See also Van Bruaene, ‘Spectacle and Spin’, pp. 268–74 (with further bibliography in n. 22). 19 Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt (1555–1590) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 54–55; and Van Bruaene, ‘Spectacle and Spin’, pp. 1–2. 20 Johannes Bochius, Descriptio publicae gratulationis, spectaculorum et ludorum, in adventu Sereniss. Principis Ernesti […] (Antwerp: Officina Plantiniana, 1595). Facsimile with introduction: Hans Mielke, The Ceremonial Entry of Ernst, Archduke of Austria, into Antwerp (New York: Bolm, 1970). See also Paul Vandenbroeck, Rondom plechtige intredes en feestelijke stadsversieringen. Antwerpen 1594–1599–1635 (Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 1981), pp. 38–44. 21 Bochius, Historica narratio profectionis et inaugurationis Serenissimorum Belgii Principum Alberti et Isabellae  […] (Antwerp: Officina Plantiniana, 1602). See Edmond Geudens, ‘Blijde inkomst der Aartshertogen Albertus en Isabella te Antwerpen in 1599’, Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis, inzonderheid van het oud hertogdom Brabant, 10 (1911), 120–40; and Vandenbroeck, Rondom plechtige intredes, pp. 44–51. 22 Caspar Gevartius, Pompa introitus Honori Serenissimi Principis Ferdinandi  […] (Antwerp: Theodoor van Thulden, 1641–42). See J. R. Martin, The Decorations of the Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi (Brussel: Corpus Rubenianum, 1972); and Vandenbroeck, Rondom plechtige intredes, pp. 51–65. Art, Music and Spectacle in the Age of Rubens, ed. by Anna Knaap and M. Putnam (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) is recently published and will hopefully put this joyous entry back on the scholarly agenda. 17

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Fig. 1: François d’Anjou entering Antwerp at the Emperor’s Gate. Engraving by Abraham de Bruyn in La joyeuse & magnifique entrée de Monseigneur François […] (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1582), plate 3. University Library Ghent: Tiel. 245.

the means of entry into the city on formal occasions since the gate’s inauguration in 1545. The print also depicts an explicit marker emphasizing the extraordinary character of the event: a dozen canons simultaneously fire shots of welcome. With this canon fire, the city symbolically expresses its satisfaction while simultaneously showcasing its military power. For his part, François d’Anjou displays both dignity and authority as, solemnly and richly dressed, he rides his horse into the city. The illustration singles him out: he is the only figure identified by a caption (‘Le Duc’); the duke’s goodwill is demonstrated by a man directly preceding him who throws coins to the civic militia. Once the parade entered the city, the ruler or governor, those taking part in the parade, and the many bystanders would have seen Antverpia herself: illustrations of the official accounts emphasize that Antverpia was to welcome the new leader immediately after he or she had entered the city through the Emperor’s Gate. The account of Prince Philip’s 1549 entry, for instance, shows the gate itself in the first illustration (Figure 2), while the following woodcut depicts the tableau vivant featuring Antverpia (Figure 3). The same sequence is seen in the accounts of François d’Anjou’s 1582 and Ernest’s 1594 entries, while in the printed accounts of the entries of Albert and Isabella in 1599 (Figure 4) and of Don Ferdinand in 1635, the gate and the wagon bearing Antwerpia appear in the same image. The Medium of the Tableau Vivant The official accounts specify that the Maid of Antwerp, foregrounded by her richly decorated stage or pageant wagon, was consistently represented through the medium of the tableau vivant. The value of the tableau vivant as a means to present the political discourse of the organizing municipality derives principally from its combination of characteristics 153

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Fig. 2: The Emperor’s Gate. Woodcut designed by Pieter Coecke van Aelst in Cornelius Grapheus, Spectaculorum in susceptione Philippi […] (Antwerp: Gillis van Diest, 1550), fol. D4v. University Library Ghent: Res. 1190.

from theatre and the visual arts. As theatre, the tableau vivant was staged by living citizens: a local girl was always chosen to play the role of Antverpia. The presence of living citizens could enforce the identification of the onlookers with the scene shown and could emphasize the idea that the entry was a civic address to the new ruler. Tableaux vivants can also be related to painting and sculpture, as they communicated a specific message with a single image. Thanks to the frozen gestures and minimal movements of a tableau vivant, time seems to have stopped as it does in a painted scene, enabling the audience to focus carefully and come to a clear understanding of the political message the ‘living’ scene sought to communicate.23 Because of its exceptional combination of theatrical and visual arts, the medium of the tableau vivant was used not only for joyous entries, but also for the theatre performances of the rederijkers (rhetoricians). Wim Hummelen has shown that the rederijkers employed a toog (tableau vivant) at crucial moments in the plots of their plays.24 At these moments, the action stopped and a tableau vivant was revealed at the rear of the stage as a means of offering a deeper — often moralistic — insight into the story being performed. It was, in fact, the rederijkers who were often responsible for staging tableaux vivants for joyous entries. Although such tableaux often appeared in rederijker plays, the use of this Bussels, Spectacle, p. 35. Wim Hummelen, ‘Het tableau vivant, de “toog” in de toneelspelen van de rederijkers’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse taalen letterkunde, 108 (1992), 193–222.

23 24

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Fig. 3: Antverpia Welcomes Prince Philip. Woodcut designed by Pieter Coecke van Aelst in Grapheus, Spectaculorum in susceptione Philippi […] (Antwerp: Gillis van Diest, 1550), fol. E3v. University Library Ghent: Res. 1190.

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medium in joyous entries indicates that the entries — and the political and social meanings they sought to convey — were extraordinary and worthy of special attention. Thanks to the simultaneously traditional and exceptional character of the tableaux, they could express the welcome and acceptance of a new ruler using powerful symbolism that would have been recognized by their audience. The message conveyed by the tableaux vivants was multi-layered, as is shown by the initial tableau featuring Antverpia in various entries. The organizers carefully took into account the role of the new ruler or governor, whose authority was explicitly stressed by the humble attitude of the Maid of Antwerp. At the same time, humble Antverpia was shown offering the new ruler the keys to the city, symbolically communicating her importance and identity. The city’s wealth and power were also signalled by Antverpia’s splendid costume, setting, and retinue. During the 1549 entry, the Maid wore a model of the tower of the Church of Our Lady, later the cathedral (Figure 3), which literally towered above the prince. The topos of welcoming a prince through the subjection of the kneeling Maid was thereby transformed into a means of honouring the booming metropolis:25 her costume implied that only a rich city like Antwerp could afford to build such an impressive structure. The message, however, is yet more complex, for the impressive tower belonged to the central ecclesiastical edifice. So Antverpia’s headpiece might also have been intended to remind Philip that his power was divinely sanctioned: the towering authority of God accompanying the representation of earthly rule. Indeed, the last tableau vivant of the 1549 entry instructed the Habsburg prince that he must kneel before God to receive ultimate approval of his temporal authority. This last scene consequently displayed a striking correspondence with the first. In it, an actor playing the role of Philip kneels before God, who bestows regalia on the Prince. Just as Antwerp had submitted to Philip by kneeling in the first tableau, the Prince was obliged to kneel before an even higher power on the final stage. The Performance of Antverpia after 1549 Similar tableaux appeared in later entries: a young local girl, often kneeling or bowing before the entering ruler or governor, represented the city at the Emperor’s Gate. She conferred symbolic gifts, such as the keys to the city, and consistently communicated the city’s riches through her beautiful dress and the impressive adornment of her retinue. But civic pride was no longer shown by a tall church tower headpiece, and references to God’s approval of the new earthly ruler were relegated to the background. The focus was placed, rather, on the way in which the new administrator would have to rule. In the 1549 entry, this aspect of the counsel offered the new ruler by the city had been expressed by having Philip accompanied by a personification of Clementia, who encouraged the Prince to act benevolently. The number of personifications defining good rule was increased for the entries of François d’Anjou (Figure 5) and Ernest (Figure 6). For these two entries the Maid of Antwerp was accompanied by allegorical figures representing such governmental ideals as Providence and Prudence (1582), and Benevolence and

25

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Kindness (1594). Personifications in the retinue of Antverpia urged both rulers to develop a policy that would serve the well-being of the people of Antwerp rather than personal gain. The illustrations for the entries of Anjou and Ernest show Antverpia sitting on similar thrones, which are decorated with putti and grotesques. Even the stairs leading to the throne are depicted in like fashion, as are the dimensions and architectural decorations of the wagons.26 The same correspondences can be seen in the illustrations of the later entries of Albert and Isabella (Figure 4) and Don Ferdinand (Figure 7), but this should not surprise us, as the same pageant wagon would have been used many times.27 Both in Spite of and Because of the Revolt The similarity among the entries between 1582 and 1635 is especially striking if we take into consideration the political context. As already indicated, the entry of François d’Anjou was a direct act of hostility to the Spanish crown, so it is remarkable to see that even after the Spanish re-conquest of the southern territories, many elements of this entry were retained in subsequent rituals. In considering the particular reuse of Antverpia’s pageant wagon, we must take into account that this vehicle was also used for the so-called ommegangen, or annual processions, in the city. The most spectacular of these would have been the Whitsun or Pentecost procession, which not only had religious but also political implications.28 As the annual procession was organized only a few weeks after the selection of new municipal officials, it was also customarily the way to witness publicly the renewed college of burgomasters and aldermen. Like the procession itself, the Whitsun pageants that took place fulfilled both religious and civic agendas. In addition to the re-enactment of biblical stories, the city itself was honoured, as is shown by the presence of Antverpia and her wagon. Other traditional wagons, such as the one bearing Druon Antigon, were also used for both the processions and the joyous entries. During the Revolt, the radical Calvinists who held power from the late 1570s until the late 1580s forbade these processions. However, as Margit Thøfner explains, the performance of Antverpia in the joyous entry of François d’Anjou evoked the communal memory of them, for example because the Maid would have been sitting on the same wagon that had been used during Pentecost.29 The implications of this dual use include that the incoming ruler or governor was welcomed by visual signals that were associated in the city with religious festivals. Indeed, during his entry Anjou occupied a place under the same golden canopy which had formerly been reserved for the host (or other relic) central to the pre-Revolt Roman Catholic processions. With these implicit references to religious processions, those in power when the entries were organized could show their audience that the old Roman Catholic tradition was being emulated. However, their aim in banning

Margit Thøfner, A Common Art: Urban Ceremonial in Antwerp and Brussels during and after the Dutch Revolt (Zwolle: Waanders, 2007), pp. 65, 184. Antwerpia also appeared on a wagon in Alexander Farnese’s joyous entry, though no visual material from this performance has survived. Thøfner, A Common Art, p. 152. 27 Nevertheless, due both to the ravages of time and to changes in taste, some modifications were made to the wagon, and these are visible in the engravings. The most striking change is the greater elevation of the throne in the later entries: it is raised on more stairs, and the upper part is more elaborately decorated with putti holding the city’s escutcheon. 28 Thøfner, A Common Art, p. 47. 29 Thøfner, A Common Art, pp. 134–35. 26

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Fig. 4: Antverpia Welcomes Albert and Isabella. Engraving by Pieter van der Borcht in Johannes Bochius, Historica narratio profectionis et inaugurationis Serenissimorum Belgii Principum Alberti et Isabellae […] (Antwerp: Officina Plantiniana, 1602), pp. 186–87. University Library Ghent: Acc. 1858.

the civic processions had been to rid these events of local religious customs which they felt deviated from a proper interpretation of the Bible and which they considered superstitious. After the Spanish re-conquest of the southern territories, the same pageant wagon appeared again, carrying Antverpia, both in joyous entries and in religious processions (which were restored to their full splendour). Thus, the use of Antverpia’s pageant wagon in the post-Revolt entries related not only to Anjou’s entry but also to the restoration of the Roman Catholic tradition in which processions marked the annual cycle of religious life in the city.30 As noted above, seeing Antverpia’s wagon in the entry during the Revolt would have evoked the memory of what had been celebrated some days or months earlier in the context of a religious festival. But in contrast to the use of Antwerpia’s pageant wagon during the Revolt, its political use after the re-conquest did not overshadow its religious origin. In other words, by using the same wagon in joyous entries and religious processions the organizers clarified that Roman Catholic faith and Habsburg rule were closely affiliated. It is plausible that, for the same reasons of affiliation, the organizers of the entries chose to preserve yet another device originating from the period of the Revolt: the canopy for the entering rulers. The illustration of Albert and Isabella’s entry shows that they too were honoured in this way (Figure 4). The reuse of both Antverpia’s pageant wagon and the canopy demonstrates that there was a consistently multi-layered interaction with previous performances in the joyous 30

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Fig. 5: Antverpia Enthroned on a Pageant Wagon. Engraving by Abraham de Bruyn in in La joyeuse & magnifique entrée de Monseigneur François […] (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1582), plate 4. University Library Ghent: Tiel. 245.

entries, even if they were organized under different political regimes. This interaction with previous performances suggests that although the organizers did not make drastic changes to the way things were done, they did have ample opportunity to adapt the festivities to current circumstances. This brings us back to the concept of ‘restored behaviour’. Schechner points out that as highly conventional as the actions of ‘restored behaviour’ might be, they ‘can be worked on, stored, played with, made into something else, transmitted and transformed’. We can say that no matter how much the pageants of Antverpia resembled each other, there were always telling differences. We can, for example, look at the precise moment of Antverpia’s performance as captured by illustrations in the various official accounts. The illustrations of the entries in 1599 and 1635 (Figures 4 and 7) combine Antverpia’s kneeling gesture of 1549 (Figure 2) with the representation of the elaborately decorated pageant wagon (Figures 5 and 6). Rather than the self-assured figure sitting on her throne, as emphasized in the illustrations from 1582 and 1594, the illustrations from 1599 and 1635 show Antverpia leaving her throne to kneel before the new ruler or governor: they depict the precise moment in which she subjects herself to the new ruler. Indeed, the illustration of the 1599 entry goes even further than that of 1635. Whereas the first (Figure 4) shows the Maid accompanied by personified political ideals, for Don Ferdinand’s entry (Figure 7) we see these allegorical figures transformed into maids of honour, with a relatively less explicit meaning. So in 1635, the governor was not explicitly shown what the city considered to be the prescriptive ideals for his rule and the illustrations indicate an increasing civic obedience to centralized power. 159

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Fig. 6: Antverpia Enthroned on a Pageant Wagon. Engraving by P. van der Borcht in Johannes Bochius, Descriptio publicae gratulationis, spectaculorum et ludorum, in adventu Sereniss. Principis Ernesti […] (Antwerp: Officina Plantiniana, 1595), p. 62. University Library Ghent: His. 3266.

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Fig. 7: Antverpia Welcomes Don Ferdinand. Engraving designed by Peter Paul Rubens and Executed by Theodoor van Thulden in Caspar Gevartius, Pompa introitus Honori Serenissimi Principis Ferdinandi […] (Antwerp: Theodoor van Thulden, 1641–42), p. 9. University Library Ghent: Acc. 5809.

François d’Anjou Meets a Persistent Antverpia In later years, differences are evident in the personifications present in the Maid of Antwerp’s entourage. For Anjou’s entry, Antverpia was accompanied by Concordia, who sat enthroned in front of the Maid (Figure 5). During this period of open revolt, all forces in the Low Countries needed to move in the same political and religious direction, and the plea for concord was repeated in many of the decorations for François’s entry. By contrast, for Ernest’s entry, only Antverpia sat enthroned (Figure 6). It is telling that in this postRevolt entry the allegory of true faith was enacted at the right hand of Antverpia. The entourage of the Maid of Antwerp thereby showed explicitly that the Catholic faith had been restored to the city following the end of the Revolt. In addition to examining the differing personifications in Antverpia’s pageant, we might also take stock of her wagon’s position in the sequence of presentations that structured the entry. On the day of Anjou’s entry, an interesting tableau vivant was performed in the marketplace (Figure 8): a baldachin over an empty throne surrounded by maidens personifying the ideals of government. Several of these personifications had also appeared in joyous entries before the Revolt, such as the figure of Clementia who sat at the left side of the throne. Three days later, the tableau appeared again, but this time without any personifications. Instead, Anjou, at first sitting on the throne, stood and swore to respect the city’s privileges in his role as the new duke of Brabant (Figure 9). Once again the concept of restored behaviour makes us aware of the interaction among different performances within one and the same entry. The set which had displayed personified governmental ideals was reused to stage the most important act performed by Anjou as part of his entry ritual: his vow to respect the city. Because this oath of office took 161

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Fig. 8: Tableau vivant of Concordia. Engraving by Abraham de Bruyn in La joyeuse & magnifique entrée de Monseigneur François […] (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1582), plate 12. University Library Ghent: Tiel. 245.

place in the same location, Anjou’s swearing to respect the city’s privileges became closely related to the city’s notions of ideal rule. Thanks to the reuse of the stage, the city could appropriate the duke’s presence to serve her own discourse: during the course of his actual entry the throne had been empty, whereas during the swearing of oaths it was the rest of the stage that was empty. The audience, therefore, had only to effect a simple act of mental substitution to see the duke surrounded by the ideals to which the municipality aspired for his rule. Moreover, memory was again called into play when the pageant wagon of Antverpia was rolled from the Emperor’s Gate to the marketplace (Figure  5). The French duke swore his oaths while standing on a stage previously used to propagate the civic ideals sought by Antwerp for his administration. The municipality went even further to show what was expected of the Duke: in front of him sat the Maid of Antwerp, enthroned and accompanied by Concordia and other allegorical personifications. It would have been hard to forget that Concordia had appeared on the same stage alongside the duke during the swearing of the oath three days earlier. This message was given extra force by having the Antwerp military guilds surround the stage and pageant wagon, and it is noteworthy that 162

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Fig. 9: Swearing of the oaths at the Grand Place. Engraving by Abraham de Bruyn in La joyeuse & magnifique entrée de Monseigneur François […] (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1582), plate 21. University Library Ghent: Tiel. 245.

such a display of civic power was not seen in the periods before or after the Revolt against the Spanish crown. Don Ferdinand Meets a Sweet Antverpia There were fewer tableaux vivants for the entry of Don Ferdinand in 1635. The triumphal arches, which had stood side by side with the tableaux from the beginning of the sixteenth century — and had sometimes even housed them — became more dominant. This evolution was not a complete deviation from previous processions, however. Tableaux vivants were still being presented in Don Ferdinand’s 1635 joyous entry, and the artistic director of the entry, Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), was clearly inspired by earlier performances of tableaux. For instance, in both the Stage of Welcome and the Temple of Janus (Figure 10), Rubens created the illusion of a tableau vivant by depicting human figures on a theatrical stage. These painted figures were cut out to simulate three-dimensional forms.31 Thanks to a curtain at the edge of the central platform, the illusion of a stage was reinforced. By examining the pageant wagon used for the performance of Antverpia, we can see that previous performances had been taken into account (Figure 7). But there are some remarkable differences from previous incarnations of the wagon, even from the most recent entry — that of Albert and Isabella. As already indicated, the allegories of ideal government 31

See Martin, The Decorations, pp. 166–67.

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Fig. 10: Templum Iani. Engraving designed by Peter Paul Rubens and executed by Theodoor van Thulden in Caspar Gevartius, Pompa introitus Honori Serenissimi Principis Ferdinandi […] (Antwerp: Theodoor van Thulden, 1641–42), plate 30. University Library Ghent: Acc. 5809.

in this tableau were replaced by maids of honour. Thus, in 1635, the first tableau no longer presented the municipality’s view of an ideal government for the incoming governor.32 Moreover, the general atmosphere of the illustration conveys the idea that negotiation On the decreasing importance of power negotiations between the city and the incoming ruler or governor in the performances of early modern joyous entries in the Southern Netherlands, see Bussels & Bram Van Oostveldt, ‘De traditie van de tableaux vivants bij de plechtige intochten in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (1496–1635)’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 115 (2002), 151–68.

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between the city and the new governor was ignored. Albert and Isabella still encounter Antverpia with some formality (Figure  4); their meeting expresses the seriousness of a ritual that has taken place many times and that will, in the end, redefine the power relationship between the city and its rulers. By contrast, in the illustration of the 1635 entry, Don Ferdinand, Antverpia, and both their retinues seem totally relaxed. The new governor approaches Antverpia in a fatherly manner, bending forward to be closer to her. The canopy has disappeared, lending the encounter even more intimacy. Don Ferdinand’s retinue looks on approvingly, and his courtiers seem pleased by the sweet demeanour of Antverpia and by her retinue of lovely girls and boys. From the very beginning of the entry, relations between Antwerp and Don Ferdinand appear as amicable as possible. A further comparison with the illustration from the account of Albert and ­Isabella’s entry shows an increasing distance between the bystanders and the central figures. The foreground is left empty in the former illustration, since no military forces are depicted, so the encounter between the governor and the Maid of Antwerp seems quite isolated. The illustration from the 1635 entry does show civic forces, but these are relegated to the background. Thus the illustration emphasizes the division between the audience and the central figures, which is reinforced by a large flag. In addition, the world of Don Ferdinand and Antverpia is separated from that of the bystanders because Antverpia’s throne is represented as standing in the clouds, a visual choice that removes the Maid of Antwerp from her civic environment and places her in a heavenly dimension. As in the illustration of the 1599 entry, the Maid of Antwerp is depicted kneeling and offering gifts to the incoming ruler. She has descended from her magnificent throne accompanied by an impressive retinue. Although a similar ritual is being performed, the illustrator’s and most probably also the organizers’ and viewers’ view of the agency of the ritual has changed. The negotiation of the power relationship, which we saw so explicitly presented in Anjou’s entry, has now assumed an even greater importance amid this graceful and other worldly assembly. Conclusion The recent debate in performance studies concerning the ephemeral character of performance has greatly enriched our understanding of performance’s social and cultural agencies. It shows how the life of a performance is not only present in the here and now, but also creates a performative memory that transcends time and place. Richard Schechner’s notion of restored behaviour conceptualizes performance as an adjusted and adapted repetition of previous performances. It makes it possible to think of performance as a complex cultural phenomenon that stands at the intersection of continuity and discontinuity, tradition and renewal. The tableaux vivants used for joyous entries in the early modern Low Countries are a case in point. Since these public tableaux had to be performed repeatedly at moments important for the city and for the incoming ruler or governor, they were strongly defined by the here and now. The tableaux allowed citizens to personify civic ideals, while mere minutes later they would step from the stage to become everyday citizens once more. But this ephemeral aspect of joyous entry performance rituals is only half the story. The citizen actors and, certainly, the organizers who put them on stage were also influenced by the long 165

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tradition of staging tableaux. Actors in and designers of each entry invoked the memory of earlier performances and referred to published accounts that described and visualized these events, engaging creatively with tradition. The specific context of each entry permitted the continual rendering and redeployment of tableaux elements which were particularly pregnant with meaning. New questions could thus be posed to the incoming ruler or governor. This paper seeks to clarify the way in which the restaging of Antverpia — before, during, and after the Revolt — can be seen as a form of restored behaviour. At the same time, it explains why Antverpia was accompanied by a changing retinue and was posed in various ways. Since the Maid of Antwerp was the central figure in the first tableau offered to a new ruler or governor, her performance was crucial for the whole entry. Many of those witnessing the spectacle would have registered how her performance repeated aspects of previous enactments, but also deviated from established tradition, bringing precedent and political circumstance to bear on the entry of each new ruler to the city of Antwerp.

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Habsburg Political Culture and Antwerp Defiant Pacification Strategies of Governors-General during the Dutch Revolt (1566–1586) Violet Soen KU Leuven

Famously, in August 1585, Habsburg Governor-General Alexander Farnese faced the delicate task of restoring peace and order in conquered Antwerp. Until then, the port at the river Scheldt had been a crucial target in his military campaign to reconquer the insurgent Calvinist Republics in Flanders and Brabant for the King of Spain, but soon it turned into a major test case for his policy of Habsburg restoration and Catholic reform. Recently, Guido Marnef has described how Farnese realized his mission to install a new political and religious order in rebellious Antwerp, and how this policy yielded the ambivalent result of a large-scale emigration and an internal re-catholicization.1 Accordingly, this present contribution aims at putting the better-known strategy of Farnese towards Antwerp into a long-term perspective of Habsburg political culture during the Dutch Revolt.2 As will be argued, the city of Antwerp defiant constituted, for two decades, the testing arena for Habsburg pacification strategies, by which the governors-general pursued a two-track policy of repression and reconciliation. Guido Marnef, ‘Reconquering a Rebellious City: Alessandro Farnese and the Siege and Recatholicization of Antwerp’, in Alessandro Farnese and the Low Countries, ed.  by Krista De Jonge (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming). Abbreviations of archives: Archivo de los Duques de Alba, Palacio de Liria, Spain, Madrid (ADA); Archives Générales du Royaume, Brussels (AGR), Papiers de l’État et de l’Audience (PEA); Archivo General de Simancas, Simancas (AGS), Estado (E), Secretarías Provinciales (SP), and Contaduría Mayor de Cuentas Segunda Época (CMC 2aE); British Library, London (BLL); Biblioteca Francisco de Zabálburu, Madrid (BFZM); Instituto Valencia de Don Juan, Madrid (IVDJ); Koninklijke Bibliotheek/Bibliothèque Royale Albert  I, Brussels (KBR), Livres Précieux (LP); and Stadsarchief Antwerpen (SAA). Abbreviations of editions: Epistolario del III Duque de Alba, Don Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, ed. by Duque de Berwick y Alba, 3 vols (Madrid: Diana, 1952) (EA); Correspondance de Philippe II sur les affaires des Pays-Bas publiée d’après les originaux conservés dans les Archives royales de Simancas, ed.  by L.  P. Gachard and L.  Lefèvre, 6  vols (Brussels: Hayez, 1848–1936) (CPhII); W. P. C. Knuttel, Catalogus van de pamflettenverzameling berustende in de Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague: Algemeene Landsdrukkerij, 1889) (K.). 2 Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt, 2nd  edn (London: Penguin Books, 1985) and Graham Darby, The Origins and Development of the Dutch Revolt (London: Routledge, 2001). On the historiography of the Dutch Revolt: J. W. Smit, ‘The Present Position of Studies Regarding the Revolt of the Netherlands’, Britain and the Netherlands, v, ed.  by John Selwyn Bromley and Ernst Heinrich Kossmann (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960), pp. 11–28; Henk van Nierop, ‘Alva’s Throne: Making Sense of the Revolt of the Netherlands’, in The Origins, ed. by Darby (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 29–47; Laura Cruz, ‘The 80 Years’ Question: The Dutch Revolt in Historical Perspective’, History Compass, 5 (2007), pp. 914–34; Judith Pollmann, ‘Internationalisering en de Nederlandse Opstand’, BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review, 124 (2009), pp. 515–35; and Cruz, ‘Reworking the Grand Narrative: A Review of Recent Books on the Dutch Revolt’, BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review, 125 (2010), pp. 29–38. 1

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 167-185. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114007

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Although Peter Arnade has brilliantly described the political culture of the insurgents in this hazardous civil war, much less is known about its Habsburg or loyalist counterpart.3 And while the ‘Netherlandish culture’ of the sixteenth century became influenced by the strife of the dissatisfied factions, it also was determined by that of their rulers. This does not imply that all Habsburg governors-general adopted a clear-cut and untailored form of pacification towards rebel cities. Rather, this chapter argues that the governors-general Margaret of Parma, the Duke of Alba, and Alexander Farnese continuously reassessed their strategies for pacification between 1566 and 1586. By comparing the Habsburg means and measures for restoring peace and order in Antwerp during the first two decades of the Revolt in the Netherlands, it will become clear that the governors-general tried to learn lessons from the experiences of their predecessors and from the corresponding reactions of the Antwerp citizens. As such, concrete attempts at reconciliation differed significantly, even over the limited time span of twenty years. Antwerp Defiant The clash between Antwerp and Philip II in the latter half of the sixteenth century was not a unique event in the history of the Low Countries. Since the late Middle Ages, conflicts between rich, powerful cities and their rulers occurred at an impressive rhythm in this highly urbanized region.4 Antwerp engaged in a power struggle similar to that of its neighbouring cities, even though violent conflict with the overlord remained absent for relatively long periods. At the end of the fifteenth century, the city had profited from the decision of the Habsburg Maximilian of Austria to favour the Antwerp harbour over that of rebel Bruges. Thanks to this privileged relationship, the city asserted itself as the major commercial city in Northern Europe throughout the sixteenth century. But, as Guy Wells has argued, even before the Dutch Revolt systematic frictions occurred between the Antwerp magistrate and the governors-general regarding jurisdiction, commerce, and the organization of urban government. Flirting with notions of civic republicanism, the city magistrate protested repeatedly against initiatives of the central government to limit local power.5 Yet the Reformation would evolve into the biggest apple of discord. While the central government opted for the rapid repression of heterodoxy in Antwerp, the harbour city continued to house important Lutheran, Anabaptist, and later Calvinist networks, chiefly in

Peter Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts & Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); and Violet Soen, Vredehandel. Adellijke en Habsburgse verzoeningspogingen tijdens de Nederlandse Opstand (1564–1581) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). 4 Cities and the Rise of States in Europe A.D. 1000 to 1800, ed.  by Wim Blockmans and Charles Tilly (Boulder: Westview, 1994), pp. 218–50; Blockmans, ‘Alternatives to Monarchical Centralization: The Great Tradition of Revolt in Flanders and Brabant’, in Republiken und Republikanismus im Europa der frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Helmut Koenigsberger (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988), pp.  145–54; Marc Boone and Maarten Prak, ‘Patricians and Burghers: The Great and the Little Tradition of Urban Revolt in the Low Countries’, in A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective, ed. by Karel Davids and Jan Lucassen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 99–134; and Jelle Haemers and Jan Dumolyn, ‘Patterns of Urban Rebellion in Medieval Flanders’, Journal of Medieval History, 31 (2005), 369–93. 5 Guy Edward Wells, ‘Antwerp and the Government of Philip II: 1555–1567’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Cornell University, 1982). See also María Rodríguez-Salado, ‘Amor, menosprecio y motines: Felipe II y las ciudades de los Países Bajos antes de la Revolución’, in Ciudades en conflicto (siglos xvi–xviii), ed. by José Ignacio Fortea and Juan Eloy Gelabert (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, Consejería de cultura y turismo, 2008), pp. 181–219. 3

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underground communities, but also publicly among foreign tradesmen.6 Marnef and, more recently, Victoria Christman, have insisted on the fact that the Antwerp magistrate often oscillated between religious toleration and repression. Employing the argument that the presence of Protestant tradesmen was necessary for the welfare of the port, the magistrate successfully acquired local exceptions to the general anti-heresy legislation.7 While the Dutch Revolt was a conflict long in the making, only from 1566 onwards did the political and religious tensions between Antwerp and Philip II clash violently. In a nutshell, the story goes as follows. With the Iconoclastic Fury in the summer of 1566, Protestants seized the opportunity to make themselves visible within the city walls. They obtained a conditional permission from the city governor, William Prince of Orange, to profess their religion publicly. Still, voluntary Calvinist armies were defeated near Antwerp in March 1567; thereafter the Prince of Orange left the city in order to meet with his relatives in the Holy Roman Empire. Quickly, the Habsburg party restored the exclusive position of Catholicism, imposing a garrison and the construction of a citadel. This ‘Spanish’ citadel served as an operating base for royal troops in the campaign against the insurgents in Holland and Zeeland led by William of Orange from April 1572 onwards. Unpaid and mutinying royal soldiers sacked Antwerp on 4 November 1576, an event better known as the Spanish Fury.8 Gradually the port city became the seat of government of the StatesGeneral, defiant towards Habsburg rule on the basis of their single-handedly concluded Pacification of Ghent (8 November 1576). Once again, the Prince of Orange tried to implement a policy of toleration by twice promulgating for Antwerp a religious peace (in 1578 and 1579). Nevertheless, Catholicism came to be forbidden by 1581 and a Calvinist Republic was progressively installed. After a long and painful siege from July 1584 onwards, the insurgent city had to accept royal authority; it capitulated on 17 August 1585.9 The Dutch Revolt brought twenty years of unrest — with successive alternation between loyalist and insurgent regimes, and between exclusive Catholicism and Calvinism — to Antwerp, with a temporary religious peace in between.10 In particular, see Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation: Underground Protestantism in a Commercial Metropolis, 1550–1577, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science Series: cxiv. i (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). See also the just published Victoria Christman, Pragmatic Toleration: The Politics of Religious Heterodoxy in Early Reformation Antwerp 1515–1555, Changing Perspectives on Early Modern Europe (Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015). 7 Marnef, ‘Tussen tolerantie en repressie: Protestanten en religieuze dissidenten te Antwerpen in de zestiende eeuw’, in Minderheden in West-Europese steden (zestiende-twintigste eeuw), ed.  by Hugo Soly and Alfons K.  L., Thijs, Belgisch Historisch Instituut te Rome, Bibliotheek: xxxiv (Brussels: Belgisch historisch instituut te Rome, 1995), pp. 189–213. 8 Etienne Rooms, ‘Een nieuwe visie op de gebeurtenissen die geleid hebben tot de Spaanse Furie te Antwerpen 4 november 1576’, Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis (1971), pp. 31–56; Gustaaf Janssens, ‘Servitium en andere militaire lasten, belangrijke elementen voor de Brabantse loyale oppositie tegen de Spaanse landvoogden’, in Mensen in oorlogstijd, ed.  by Fernand Vanhemelryck and others (Brussels: UFSAL, Centrum voor Brabantse Geschiedenis, 1988), pp. 25–55; Amanda Pipkin, ‘They Were Not Humans, But Devils in Human Bodies: Depiction of Sexual Violence and Spanish Tyranny as a Means of Fostering Identity in the Dutch Republic’, Journal of Early Modern History, 13 (2009), pp. 229–64; and Pipkin, ‘Every Woman’s Fear: Stories of Rape and Dutch Identity in the Golden Age’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 122  (2009), ­pp. 290–305. 9 Rob Van Roosbroeck, Het Wonderjaar te Antwerpen (1566–1567). Inleiding tot de studie der godsdienstonlusten van den Beeldenstorm af (1566) tot de inneming der stad door Alexander Farnese (1585) (Antwerp and Leuven: De Sikkel, 1930). The account by Marnef is more nuanced and accurate, however. 10 Marnef, ‘Multiconfessionalism in a Commercial Metropolis: The case of 16th-Century Antwerp’, in A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World, ed. by Thomas Safley (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 75–97; and Marnef, ‘The Process of Political Change under the Calvinist Republic in Antwerp (1577–1585)’, in Des villes en révolte: Les Républiques urbaines aux Pays-Bas et en France pendant la deuxième moitié du 16e siècle, ed. by Monique Weis (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 25–33. 6

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Fig. 1: Frans Hogenberg, Promulgation of the General Pardon in Antwerp on the 16th of July 1570. KU Leuven, ­Universiteitsbibliotheek, Bijzondere Collecties – © Bruno Vandermeulen

At first glance, the case of Antwerp during the Dutch Revolt confirms the classic pattern of urban revolt and its repression by rulers in the Netherlands. Previously the dukes of Burgundy, aiming to control their rich urban competitors, did not hesitate to punish city revolts harshly. Occasionally they even proceeded to an exemplary destruction of minor cities to discourage further rebellion. Wim Blockmans and Marc Boone have discerned a ‘Burgundian scenario’ in this repression of urban revolts. That script of repression included a wide range of punishments such as the removal of privileges; the dismantlement of symbolic urban spaces; ritual ceremonies of punishment (known as the amendes honorables); and the imposition of financial measures and fines.11 Recently, Peter Arnade unravelled how these Burgundian agendas of princely centralization continued in the Habsburg repression of cities during the Dutch Revolt. As such, the repression in Antwerp under the regime of King Philip II echoed this Burgundian scenario, as each political reorganization by the loyalist party aimed at diminishing the aspirations of self-government included in the privileges. The additional military troops and, especially, the construction of a citadel were aimed to contain Antwerp under Habsburg control by modifying the urban space of Boone, ‘Destroying and Reconstructing the City: The Inculcation and Arrogation of Princely Power in the BurgundianHabsburg Netherlands (14th–16th Centuries)’, in The Propagation of Power in the Medieval West: Selected Proceedings of the International Conference, Groningen, 20–23 November 1996, ed. by Martin Gosman and others, Mediaevalia Groningana: xxiii (Groningen: Forsten, 1997), pp.  1–33; Blockmans, ‘La répression de révoltes urbaines comme méthode de centralisation dans les Pays-Bas bourguignons’, in Milan et les États bourguignons: Deux ensembles politiques princiers entre Moyen Âge et Renaissance (xive–xve siècles), ed.  by Jean-Marie Cauchies, Publications du Centre européen d’études bourguignonnes: xxviii (Basel: Centre européen d’études bourguignonnes, 1988), pp. 5–9.

11

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the metropolis. After its capitulation in 1585, the city had to pay a heavy fine and had to finance the reconstruction of the citadel (if the war continued, which it did). Nevertheless, the old Burgundian scenario of harsh punishment yielded contradictory effects during the Dutch Revolt: the repression and repeated sacking of rebel cities as well as mutinies by royal troops fuelled rebellion instead of pacifying it. This has led Peter Arnade to argue that continued civic resistance and outrage over the repression was gradually framed as a legitimated fight for ‘freedom’ against the triad of ‘Spanish soldiers, Furies, and King’.12 The Burgundian scenario of repression only provides part of the story, however. The on-going struggle for the position of Catholicism and Protestantism in society introduces another aspect, in which the legacy of Emperor Charles V became pivotal. Philip II cherished the wish of his father to maintain the Netherlands as exclusively Catholic.13 The King of Spain refused to accept settlements like the Augsburg religious peace for the Seventeen Provinces, and did not hesitate to repeat this to imperial envoys.14 Similarly, the King was not at all convinced of the efficacy of the bi-confessional agreements of the French King (the so-called édits de pacification) for restoring peace.15 Philip  II had consciously evaluated the results of these ‘edicts of toleration’: both after the legal accommodations of the 1562 édit de Janvier and the 1563 édit d’Amboise, religious violence spread again, particularly at the Pyrenean frontier with Spain.16 Therefore, in 1565 Philip dispatched his French consort Elisabeth de Valois to convince her mother and her brother (the King of France) that the decrees of the Council of Trent were the solution, and that bi-confessional agreements were not.17 For Philip II, France gradually became the example of how not to do things, and he often alleged that the kings of France had made things worse by granting Protestants some rights of worship. It is noteworthy that Philip II persisted in this strand of Arnade, Beggars, esp. Chapter 7: ‘Spanish Furies: Sieges, Sacks, and the City Defiant’, pp. 212–50; and Boone, ‘The Dutch Revolt and the Medieval Tradition of Urban Dissent’, Journal of Early Modern History, 11 (2007), pp. 351–75. See also Marnef, ‘The Towns and the Revolt’, in The Origins, ed. by Darby (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 84–106; and James D. Tracy, The Founding of the Dutch Republic: War, Finance, and Politics in Holland, 1572–1588 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). For a historiographical survey on the repression of cities during the Dutch Revolt, see Soen, ‘¿Más allá de la leyenda negra? Léon van der Essen y la historiografía reciente en torno al castigo de las ciudades rebeldes en los Países Bajos (siglos xiv a xvi)’, in El Ejército Español en Flandes 1567–1584, ed. by Léon Van der Essen and Janssens (Cuacos de Yuste: Fundación Academia Europea de Yuste, 2008), pp. 45–72. 13 Janssens, ‘Van vader op zoon. Continuïteit in het beleid van Karel V en Filips II met betrekking tot de Nederlanden’, in Dos monarcas y una historia en común: España y Flandes bajo los reinados de Carlos V y Felipe II (Madrid: Sociedad estatal para la conmemoración de los centenarios de Felipe II y Carlos V, 2001), pp. 89–102; and Heinz Schilling, ‘The Struggle for the Integrity and Unity of Christendom’, in Carolus: Keizer Karel V 1500–1558, ed. by Soly (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1999), pp. 285–365. 14 Johannes Arndt, ‘Die kaiserlichen Friedensvermittlungen im spanisch-niederländischen Krieg 1568–1609’, Rheinische Vierteljahresblätter, 62 (1998), pp. 161–83; Weis, ‘La Paix d’Augsbourg de 1555: Un Modèle pour les Pays-Bas? L’Ambassade des princes luthériens allemands auprès de Marguerite de Parme en 1567’, in Entre Royaume et Empire: Frontières, rivalités et modèles, Publications du Centre européen d’études bourguignonnes: xlii (Neuchâtel: Centre européen d’études bourguignonnes, 2002), pp. 87–100. 15 This intransigency of Philip II regarding the Catholic religion has been identified as an obstacle to peace during the Dutch Revolt. To quote Philip Benedict in 1999, ‘Time and again — in 1566, 1577, 1579, 1589 and 1598 — Philip refused to concede rights of worship to the Protestants comparable to those granted by Charles IX and Henry III in France, even though it now seems with hindsight that these were all moments when he might have been able to end the political crisis in the Netherlands by doing so’. Benedict, ‘The Dynamics of Reformed Religious Militancy: The Netherlands, 1566–1585’, in Reformation, Revolt, and Civil War in France and the Netherlands, 1555–1585, ed. by Benedict and others (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1999), p. 16. 16 Jean Boutier, Alain Dewerpe, and Daniel Nordman, Un Tour de France royal: Le Voyage de Charles IX (1564–1566) (Paris: Aubier, 1984), pp. 160–61; and Jérémy Foa, ‘Making Peace: The Commission for Enforcing the Pacification Edicts in the Reign of Charles IX (1560–1574)’, French History, 18 (2004), pp. 256–74. 17 Weis, ‘La peur du grand complot catholique: La diplomatie espagnole face aux soupçons des protestants allemands (1560–1570)’, Francia. Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte, 32 (2005), pp. 15–30. 12

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Fig. 2: Hans Vredeman de Vries, Allegory on the reconciliation of Antwerp, after 1585. Museum Vleeshuis, Antwerp, AV 2009.009.01 – © Bart Huysmans.

reasoning after the religious settlements that William of Orange tested in Antwerp in the wake of the Iconoclastic Fury in 1566. After the Farnese victory, Antwerp would develop into a bastion of the Counter-Reformation.18 As Geoffrey Parker has pointed out more systematically, the King always feared that the loss of the Catholic religion in the Netherlands would result in the loss of many other territories for the composite Spanish monarchy; the Netherlands were but one part of his ‘Grand Strategy’ for his world empire.19 This essay argues that neither the Burgundian scenario of repression, nor the Grand Strategy of Philip II made for a concrete policy of pacification on the ground, and certainly not when applied to the metropolis of Antwerp. Whereas the aforementioned military pressure and the politico-religious repression served as the stick, sometimes concessions served as the carrot to smooth the Habsburg restoration and re-catholicization. Certainly, concessions were never easily granted, as the King (and more often his advisors) was afraid that they could be used against his authority. Time and again, endless debates surfaced regarding the exact form measures of accommodation might take. To complicate things further, distance prevented a smooth coordination of attempts at reconciliation: for example, 18 Thijs, Van Geuzenstad tot katholiek bolwerk. Maatschappelijke betekenis van de Kerk in contrareformatorisch Antwerpen (Turnhout: Brepols, 1990); and Marie Juliette Marinus, De contrareformatie te Antwerpen (1585–1676): kerkelijk leven in een grootstad (Brussels: Koninklijk Vlaamse Academie, 1995). 19 Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven: Yale University, 1998); and Fernando González de León, ‘The Grand Strategy of Philip II and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1559–1584’, in Reformation, Revolt, ed.  by Benedict and others, pp. 215–32.

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letters took (on average) two weeks to travel between Madrid and Brussels, if they were not lost. To circumvent major evil, the King often delegated the power to make concrete and pragmatic decisions to the governors, who could then decide ‘according the circumstances’.20 Hence the governors-general received, to a certain extent, a margin for negotiation regarding la pacification des troubles. At first, Governess Margaret of Parma tried to accommodate the situation in Antwerp with moderate legislation. Subsequently, under the Duke of Alba a general pardon was attempted as a means of sparking reconciliation with King and Church. Finally, the capitulation treaties under Farnese foresaw the possibility of a ius emigrandi for Protestants and a full pardon for citizens. Even if the genesis and implementation of these three attempts at conciliation are scrutinized separately for Antwerp, they should at all times be understood as a complement to the aforementioned repressive and military manoeuvres. Special attention will therefore be paid in what follows to the interplay between the Habsburg strategy in general and its implementation in Antwerp in particular. Mobilization and Moderation The first governor-general to be confronted with large-scale political and religious unrest in the Netherlands was Duchess Margaret of Parma (1522–86). Though an illegitimate daughter of Emperor Charles V, she had been swiftly acknowledged as a member of the Habsburg dynasty. Margaret was appointed in 1559, when Philip  II departed for the Iberian Peninsula and preferred his half-sister over other relatives bargaining for the same job. In doing so, the King aimed to follow in his father’s footsteps by appointing family members in Brussels and by enhancing dynastic continuity within his composite monarchy.21 Still, she was certainly not a puppet on the string of Madrid: wedded to the Duke of Parma, Margaret also defended the House of Farnese, sometimes against Habsburg interests.22 As governor for the Netherlands, she often felt deprived of prompt guidelines by her half-brother. Therefore, she relied on the advice of her own secretaries and the senior Brussels bureaucrats, like Cardinal Granvelle and the lawyer Viglius.23 Margaret always favoured initiatives of Catholic religious reform, especially by the Jesuits, and she was uncomfortable with the spread of the Reformation. According to her own testimony, the Duchess of Parma preferred to be ‘torn apart in pieces, rather than to permit more than one

Parker, The Grand Strategy, pp. 47–75. For the bibliography on the biographies of Margaret of Parma, the Duke of Alba and Alexander Farnese, I refer to the extensive footnotes in Soen, ‘Philip II’s Quest: The Appointment of Governors-General during the Dutch Revolt (1559– 1598)’, BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review, 126 (2011), pp. 3–27. See also Horst Rabe and Peter Marzahl, ‘Comme représentant nostre propre personne: Regentschaften und Regentschaftsordnungen Kaiser Karels V’, in Karl V. Politik und politisches System, ed. by Rabe (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1996), pp. 71–94. 22 Sebastiaan Derks, ‘Madama’s Minister: Tomás de Armenteros at the Court of Margarita of Austria’, in Agentes y Identidades en movimiento. España y los Países Bajos, siglos xvi–xviii, ed. by Maurits Ebben and others (Madrid: Silex, 2011), pp.  49–70; and Maria-Jose Rodríguez-Salgado, ‘Almost a Royal Eagle: Alexander Farnese and the Spanish Monarchy’, in Alessandro Farnese, ed. by De Jonge, forthcoming. 23 Folkert Postma, ‘Granvelle, Viglius en de adel’, in Les Granvelle et les anciens Pays-Bas, Liber doctori Mauricio Van Durme dedicatus, ed. by De Jonge and Janssens (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2000), pp. 157–77; and Postma, ‘Van bescheiden humanist tot vechtjas. Viglius van Aytta en de crisis van 1566–1567’, BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review, 123 (2008), pp. 323–40. 20 21

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religion’.24 From the beginning of her governorship, Antwerp proved a hard nut to crack. Her attempts to install a bishop in Antwerp, as had been planned as part of the bishopric reconfiguration that Philip  II revealed before his departure in 1559, failed. Instead, she had to silence the rumour that this bishopric scheme served to introduce the ‘Spanish Inquisition’ into Antwerp, an item of gossip within the city walls and an argument by the city magistrate used to counter every reform whatsoever, even in the financial sphere.25 On 15 August 1566, religious riots hit the city of Antwerp hard: the iconoclasm was mainly directed at ‘purifying’ the sacred space of the cathedral and other churches within the city walls.26 The underground Protestant communities then became militant in order to obtain concessions from the public sphere.27 The outbreak of the Iconoclastic Fury in Antwerp and in other cities left Margaret of Parma in total despair, even to the extent that she twice wanted to flee from Brussels to Mons.28 Henceforth, she would follow a ‘zigzag policy’ between moderation and mobilization.29 She still relied on Viglius as her main advisor, but she also temporarily sought the counsel of the Knights of the Golden Fleece and of the provincial governors in order to restore peace and order. These aristocrats then led negotiations in Brussels for an agreement with the dissatisfied Compromise of Nobles, who from the autumn of 1565 had asked for the abrogation of religious persecution.30 Strikingly, on 23–25 August 1566 she endorsed a highly conditional permission for Protestant preaching. Juliaan Woltjer has dubbed this curious agreement with the Compromise of Nobles the ‘first victory of the moderates’ since, according to him, it permitted the worship of two religions and thus inaugurated a humanist via media towards religious co-existence.31 In fact, the agreement was officially framed as ‘lettres patentes en forme d’asseurance’ (‘open letters in the form of reassurance’) for the members of the Compromise. According to its stipulations, the governor was henceforth willing to see these malcontent nobles as loyal vassals and to give them asseurance, so long as they neither contravened royal sovereignty nor the Catholic religion. To this end, they had to prevent disorder and to disarm their league. In addition, the permission granted by the agreement for Protestant preaching was defined in a negative way: the formerly compromised nobles had henceforth to prevent preaching in places where it had not taken place before 23 August and, under all circumstances, stop Margaret to Philip II, 27/08/1566: AGS E 530 s.f.; Olwen Hufton, ‘Altruism and Reciprocity: The Early Jesuits and their Female Patrons’, Renaissance Studies, 15 (2001), pp. 328–53 (pp. 340–41); and Giampiero Brunelli, ‘Tra eretici e gesuiti. I primi anni di Margherita a Roma’, in Margherita d’Austria (1522–1586): Costruzioni politiche e diplomazia, tra corte Farnese e monarchia spagnola, ed. by Silvia Mantini (Rome: Bulzoni, 2003), pp. 65–84 (pp. 77–78). 25 When, in March 1565, commissioners from the Council of Finance heard sworn witnesses, the Antwerp magistrates protested that this was ‘une forme et espèce d’Inquisition’. See Wells, Antwerp, p. 350. See also F. Edward Beemon, ‘The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition and the Preconditions for the Dutch Revolt’, ARG, 85 (1994), 246–64; and Gert Gielis and Soen, ‘The Inquisitorial Office in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries: A Dynamic Perspective’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 66 (2015), pp. 47–66. 26 Arnade, Beggars, Chapter 4. 27 Jozef Scheerder, De Beeldenstorm (Bussum: De Haan, 1974); and Arnade, Beggars, pp. 90–165. 28 Postma, ‘Van bescheiden humanist tot vechtjas’, pp. 330–31. 29 I coined the term ‘zigzagpolitiek’ in Soen, ‘C’estoit comme songe et mocquerie de parler de pardon: Obstructie bij een pacificatiemaatregel (1566–1567)’, BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review, 119 (2004), pp. 309–28 (p. 319); and now Soen, ‘The Beeldenstorm and the Spanish Habsburg Response (1566–1570)’, BMGN-The Low Countries Historical Review, 131 (2016), pp. 99–120. 30 Soen, ‘Between Dissent and Peacemaking: Nobility at the Eve of the Dutch Revolt (1564–1567)’, Revue belge de Philologie et d’Histoire (henceforth RBPH), 86 (2008), pp. 735–58. 31 Juliaan Woltjer, ‘Political Moderates and Religious Moderates in the Revolt of the Netherlands’, in Reformation, Revolt, ed. by Benedict and others, pp. 185–200; and Woltjer, Op weg naar Tachtig jaar oorlog. Het verhaal van de eeuw waarin ons land ontstond (Amsterdam: Balans, 2011), p. 383. 24

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preachers who caused scandal or public disorder. Thus, tacitly, preaching (but not worship) could continue in places where it had already taken place, on the additional condition that this had happened without military protection.32 At the same time, a royal edict of 25 August prescribed heavy punishments for iconoclasts. Everyone received permission to kill iconoclasts ‘comme l’on faict d’un ennemy commun de la Patrie’ (‘as you would an enemy of the Fatherland’). Those who took up arms during rioting were to be put to death like rebels and their property confiscated.33 Despite their careful formulation, these lettres d’asseurance were implemented very differently in the various provinces and cities of the Seventeen Provinces.34 But by any account the base of concessions was smaller than in France, where the édits de pacification conditionally granted Protestants rights of worship.35 Antwerp attempted the most daring interpretation of these lettres d’asseurance under the auspices of its margrave, Prince William of Orange, though without the formal consent of the governess. On 2 September 1566, after negotiations and preliminary agreements, the Prince of Orange provided three places for Protestant worship within the city walls. The agreement with ‘ceulx de la nouvelle Religion’ (‘those of the new Religion’) did not explicitly name the governess, but stipulated that it would hold until the King made a final decision following consultation with the States-General. Three days later, the Council of State in Brussels deliberated how to abrogate the concessions granted in Antwerp. Even the Count of Egmond recognized that Orange was operating in the grey zone of the August agreement, yet advised in any case not to offend the Prince in order to prevent further radicalization;36 this thus became the policy of accommodation which would apply to Antwerp during the following months. Even so, the first wave of emigration out of the metropolis started, making Antwerp’s economy particularly vulnerable.37 At this stage, Margaret wanted clearer guidelines from the King, while she carefully prevented the concessions made for Antwerp from being applied in other cities as well.38 Hence Antwerp could profit, at least initially, from its importance as a commercial city and could bargain on local and temporary exceptions from the religious laws, just as it had done before the Iconoclastic Fury. The deliberations in Madrid as to what might constitute an adequate response towards the Iconoclastic Fury lasted a long time. Philip  II eventually opted for a tactic in which an army would leave for the Netherlands in order to pave the way for his Soen, Vredehandel, pp.  68–77; and Copie des lettres patentes en forme d’assevrance que la Ducesse de Parme, Regente etc. a donné aux Gentilzhommes confederez, ayant presenté la Requeste, au mois d’Avril soixantecinq avant Pasques. Ensemble des Reuersalles desdictz Gentilshommes. Et aussi des lettres closes escriptes par son Alteze pour le mesme effect aux Consaulx et principales villes de pardeça, ed. by Michel de Hamont (Brussels, 1566), [BT 2490], KBR LP 1433 A. A draft of the text can be found in AGR PEA 244/1, fol. 112. See also Copie des lettres d’asseurance aux confederez, 23/8/1566: AGS SP 2604 s.f. 33 Placcart et ordonnance du roy  […] pour remedier aux saccaigemens, pilleries & ruynes des temples, eglises, cloistres & monasteres. Et donner orde à l’Emotion populaire, en ces pays d’embas, [25/08/1566], ed. by De Hamont (Brussels, 1566), [BT 2491], KBR LP 1434 A. 34 Maarten Hageman, Het kwade exempel van Gelre. De stad Nijmegen, de Beeldenstorm en de Raad van Beroerten, 1566–1568 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2005). 35 Olivier Christin, ‘From Repression to Pacification: French Royal Policy in the Face of Protestantism’, in Reformation, Revolt, ed. by Benedict and others, pp. 201–14. 36 Deliberations of the Council of State, 5/09/1566: AGR PEA 780, fols 147–48. 37 For Antwerp especially, see Janssens, Brabant in het verweer: loyale oppositie tegen Spanje’s bewind in de Nederlanden van Alva tot Farnese 1567–1578, Standen en Landen: lxxxix (Kortrijk: UGA, 1989), pp. 130–31. 38 Margaret to the city of Valenciennes, 9/1566: AGR PEA 244/2 fol. 49 (draft), preventing Valenciennes from asking similar concessions as Antwerp. 32

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own arrival as Forgiving Father and Clement King granting a general pardon.39 In the meantime (and as is less-known), Margaret of Parma and her advisors opted for a phased strategy that would eventually reinstall exclusive Catholicism. In the first phase, they concentrated on cities where no hedge preaching occurred before 23 August 1566. In the second phase, they decided to ‘purify’ cities where preaching was more or less permitted, if necessary with additional troops. In both phases, they used the clause in the lettres d’asseurance stating that preaching should not cause public disorder as a juridical means of abolishing Protestant preaching and worship on the whole. For the reasons encountered above, and the fact that hedge preaching within the city walls had occurred before 23 August, Antwerp was positioned relatively far along the row of cities needing to be ‘purified’. The assault of the Calvinist volunteer army of the nobleman Henry of Brederode hastened events, however.40 William of Orange initially tried to claim new concessions for the Protestants, even though he had forbidden the Antwerp Calvinists from helping their co-religionists outside the city walls. The governess, however, felt empowered by the simultaneous capitulation of Valenciennes, the ‘new Genève’ where Calvinists had temporarily built a stronghold. She now forbade all Protestant preaching and required the Prince of Orange to renew his oath of loyalty to King and Church. Orange, however, decided to resign his functions in the Seventeen Provinces, and to leave for his family castle in Dillenburg in the Holy Roman Empire.41 After the departure of William of Orange, the governor-general concluded a preliminary and temporary agreement with representatives of Antwerp on 7 April 1567. In its most important point, it provided that the city would accept a garrison within the city walls and that royal authority would be restored. She also granted some provisional concessions to the magistrate — concessions about which she did not inform the King. In all, she thought that her task of restoring order in the Seventeen Provinces had been met relatively successfully. With a mission to the King, she solicited in vain to postpone the arrival of the royal army, which seemed to her now unnecessary. From 28 April onwards, she resided in Antwerp to negotiate further with the city magistrate, in order to accomplish her work for the pacification of the Netherlands. As Marnef commented and Gustaaf Janssens recently better documented, the ensuing provisional ordinance for Antwerp of 24 May 1567 resulted again in moderate legislation, at least by Habsburg standards.42 As before, the ordinance required the punishment of iconoclasts and rebels; preachers and their helpers would again be castigated. The decree was more hesitant, though, on the necessity of capital punishment and, as such, it was reminiscent of the project of a ‘Moderation’ of the On the importance of the voyage of the King: Parker, ‘1567: The End of the Dutch Revolt?’, in España y las 17 provincias de los Países Bajos. Una revisión historiográfica (XVI–XVIII), ed.  by Ana Crespo Solana and Manuel Herrero Sánchez, 2 vols (Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba, 2002), i, pp. 269–90. 40 Postma, ‘Van bescheiden humanist tot vechtjas’, pp. 334–36. 41 Liesbeth Geevers, Gevallen vazallen. De integratie van Oranje, Egmont en Horn in de Spaans-Habsburgse monarchie (1559–1567) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), pp. 170–71; and Soen, Vredehandel, pp. 72–75. 42 Marnef, ‘The Towns and the Revolt’, p. 95; and Marnef, Antwerp, pp. 88–107. Janssens has provided an edition and contextualization of the ordinance of 24 May 1567 in his ‘De ordonnantie betreffende de pacificatie van de beroerten te Antwerpen (24 mei 1567): breekpunt voor de politiek van Filips II ten overstaan van de Nederlanden’, Handelingen van de Koninklijke Commissie voor de Uitgave der Oude Wetten en Verordeningen van België, 50 (2009), pp. 102–32. See Ordonnance et edict provisional […] par sa majesté sur la pacification des troubles […] d’Anvers, au faict de la religion […] publié le XXVIII. jour de may  […] MDLXVII, ed.  by Guillaume Silvius (Antwerp, 1567), KBR LP 1452 A, KBR Manuscripts 17510–25, fols 208–19. 39

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religious placards (religious laws) which had been debated a year earlier.43 The remainder of the text was dedicated to prevent ‘major evil’ (in Viglius’s words) and, above all, to prevent further emigration. The preservation of commerce in Antwerp thus resulted in mitigated legislation, but inquiries into people suspected of causing troubles started afterwards. Margaret also allotted much effort to the reconstruction of Church property.44 Reasons for this moderate approach might have been a combination of the personality of the Governor, her acquaintance with local elites, the influence of her humanist legal advisor Viglius, and, as before, the exceptional bargaining power Antwerp could wield. After having dealt with Antwerp, Margaret twice tendered her resignation as governor-general, arguing that ‘her job was done’, but a disagreement between Madrid and Brussels on the strategy used in Antwerp soon arose. The King protested heavily against the ordinance of 24 May, especially on the relaxation of capital punishment that had been prescribed by the last laws of his father. His confessor Bernardino de Fresneda, Bishop of Cuenca, had written a crushing report on the mild penalties, which according to him could lead to an inappropriate liberty of conscience. A new ordinance of 23 July thus definitively abrogated Margaret’s concessions and restored the Caroline heresy legislation.45 This might have been seen as a reproach of Margaret, but one should not forget that from 1577 onwards Philip II solicited her again for the governorship in the Netherlands.46 Rather than a conflict between persons, then, there was a divergent view on how conciliatory gestures should be designed. In fact, Margaret still hoped for a general pardon which could be promulgated with the arrival of the King, but as long as this was not the case, she had acted pragmatically and in accordance with earlier legal concessions.47 In the end, she was more offended — with regard to her person and on behalf of the Farnese House — by the fact that she had to relinquish her position as captain-general to the commander who would lead the punitive army into Flanders. Her announced resignation assured that this Spanish general, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, third Duke of Alba, would succeed her in the Brussels governorship as well. Punishment and Pardon It was not without reason that Alba was reputed to be a hardliner on Habsburg policy regarding the Netherlands. Even long before he accepted the Brussels governorship in October 1567, he had obtained a reputation as a ‘hawk’ in his campaigns against the Ottomans, the Italian princes and the Schmalkaldian League.48 After the Iconoclastic Fury, he advocated (in the Madrilenian Consejo de Estado) the hardline option of sending an army to restore order before the King came to grant a general pardon — a proposal much in line with the aforementioned views of the royal confessor Bernardino de Fresneda. The third commander to be solicited, he was the first to accept command of the punitive expedition for which he was vested with exceptional powers. He also received permission to install a Janssens, Brabant, pp. 121–22; and Soen, Vredehandel, pp. 59–65. Andrew Spicer, ‘After Iconoclasm, Reconciliation and Resacralization in the Southern Netherlands, c.  1566–85’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 54 (2013), pp. 411–33 (pp. 412–13). 45 Janssens, ‘De ordonnantie’, pp. 116–19. 46 Adela Repetto Álvarez, ‘Acerca de un possible segundo govierno de Margareta de Parma y el cardenal Granvela en los estados de Flandes’, Hispania, 32 (1972), pp. 379–475; and Hugo de Schepper, ‘Le voyage difficile de Marguerite de Parme en Franche-Comté et en Flandre 1580–1583’, in Margherita d’Austria (1522–1586), ed. by Mantini, pp. 127–40. 47 Janssens, ‘De ordonnantie’, p. 115. 48 Janssens, ‘Het oordeel van tijdgenoten en historici over Alva’s bestuur in de Nederlanden’, RBPH, 54 (1976), pp. 474–88. 43 44

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‘Council of Troubles’ for the exemplary punishment of the main instigators of this ‘rebellion and heresy’ (quite the opposite of Margaret, who had tried to relax the penalties for minor offenders, as seen above). Alba erected this retributive tribunal immediately upon his arrival in Brussels, arresting the distinguished Counts of Egmond and Horn, Knights of the Golden Fleece, who were convicted for political resistance and their perceived failure to intervene during the Iconoclastic Fury. This repression created for William of Orange and his allies an additional incentive to invade the Netherlands during the spring of 1568, yet Alba took much pride in crushing this campaign at Jemmingen during the summer of the same year.49 While undertaking his punitive mission in the Netherlands, Alba made Antwerp his preferred city to serve as an example of the new political and religious order. This strategy was probably inspired by earlier decisions made in Madrid, where the actions of William of Orange in Antwerp had been heavily criticized in the Consejo de Estado. Soon, the Duke started construction of the fortress that had already been planned by Margaret, to which he became closely associated because it was he who imposed this ‘Spanish citadel’ on the harbour. In 1569, he ordained a spectacular razzia of forbidden books precisely when the Antwerp printing industry was at its height. Moreover, he forced the city to finally accept the installation of a bishop within its city walls in March 1570, as had been long foreseen in the bishopric reform of 1559 but had since then been postponed as a concession. Alba crowned these efforts with the erection, in the court of the citadel, of the famous statue made from the canons captured at Jemmingen, in which the Duke displayed himself as an omnipotent victor, crushing the privileges of the Netherlands.50 In this context of rapid and harsh repression, it might seem a paradox that the Duke of Alba would be the first governor to promulgate a general pardon ‘donnée pour le fait des troubles passés’ (‘given for the circumstances of the past troubles’). Even when Philip II had decided to postpone (and later cancel) his travel, the King continued to deliberate on the strategy of eventually forgiving the repentant inhabitants of the Seventeen Provinces.51 This was to happen by means of the aforementioned general pardon, which was the common term for the collective giving of grace to the people — or, more concretely, to those who showed repentance for their occasional misdeeds during events leading up to the Iconoclastic Fury. Hence, a general pardon could bring both a formal and a symbolic reconciliation between Philip  II and his subjects — and, as such, it was conceived as an efficient and peaceful means of preventing further turmoil. Different reasoning supported this measure of conciliation, which diverged from the moderate legislation that Margaret of Parma had tried in Antwerp. If indeed religious beliefs required the death of a stubborn heretic,

Janssens, ‘El ejército español y la Guerra de Flandes (1559–1598). Una bibliografía 1963–2008’, in El Ejército Español, ed. by Van der Essen and Janssens, pp. 395–438. 50 Arnade, Beggars, pp. 201–02. 51 Unless cited otherwise, evidence for these paragraphs is to be found in Soen, Geen pardon zonder paus! Studie over de complementariteit van het koninklijk en pauselijk generaal pardon (1570–1574) en over inquisiteur-generaal Michael Baius (1560–1576), Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, Nieuwe reeks: xiv (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 2007). 49

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Catholic faith simultaneously urged reconciliation between penitents and the Church.52 If rebellion called for deliberate repression in the political theory of the School of Salamanca, classical humanist thought simultaneously taught that mercy encouraged the acceptance of and love for the victor.53 Finally, there was a dynastic incentive for leniency, as Maximilian I of Austria had introduced clemency as an innate virtue of the Habsburgs, and Charles V had deliberately referred to it in his policies.54 But this royal pardon was never general, nor was it ever meant to be: according to juridical commonplaces, unlimited grace was as unwarranted as no grace whatsoever. Restrictions had to justify a general pardon: traitors, banned persons, leaders of the religious riots, and Protestant ministers were excluded. Indeed, the text proposed by Alba (which was ultimately accepted) broadly excluded such groups as reformed ministers or those who had carried arms. Moreover, the most important condition for pardon was a prior reconciliation with the Church, enabled by a pardon of the Pope, who could forgive heresy cases. Hence the general pardon was thought to be a temporary measure of grace, not a change in legislation, as Margaret had attempted.55 Despite the important restrictions on who was to receive it, the general pardon was conceived as a means of marking the end of the repression and of beginning a new era of reconciliation among the inhabitants of the Netherlands, the King, and the Church. Typical problems of miscommunication delayed its promulgation, however. By August 1567, when postponing his voyage to the Seventeen Provinces, Philip II had suggested sending his half-brother Don Juan de Austria with a general pardon, but Alba vetoed this plan for unknown reasons.56 This enabled the Duke to continue his line of severity and strictness and to bring all the culpable to trial before the Council of Troubles without granting any pardon whatsoever — and, accordingly, to have Egmond and Horn executed on 5 June 1568. Again, many councillors thought that after this ‘exemplary punishment’ the pardon would and should be issued immediately.57 For Philip II, then, the defeat of Orange and his brother at Jemmingen in 1568 constituted a motive to grant pardon from the position See Brad  S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 74–96, for the argumentation of the ‘willingness to kill’ of the rulers. For the reconciliation of penitent heretics in the Low Countries, see Soen, ‘De reconciliatie van “ketters” in de zestiende-eeuwse Nederlanden (1520– 1590)’, Trajecta, 14 (2005), pp. 337–62; and, under Charles V, De Schepper, ‘Entre compromis et répression: Inquisition et clémence aux Pays-Bas sous Charles Quint’, Charles Quint face aux réformes. Colloque international organisé par le Centre d’histoire des Réformes et du protestantisme, ed. by Guy Le Thiec and Alain Tallon (Paris: Champion, 2005), pp. 159–77; and Marjan Vrolijk and De Schepper, ‘The Other Face of Struggle Against Violence: Peace of Order by Clemency in the Netherlands, 1500–1650’, in Janus at the Millennium: Perspectives on Time in the Culture of the Netherlands, ed. by Thomas Frederic Shannon and Johan P. Snapper, Publications of the American Association for Netherlandic Studies: xv (Lanham: University Press of America, 2004), pp. 279–95. 53 José  A. Fernández-Santamaria, The State, War, and Peace: Spanish Political Thought in the Renaissance 1516–1559 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Ronald W. Truman, Spanish Treatises on Government, Society, and Religion in the Time of Philip II: The ‘De regimine principum’ and Associated Traditions, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History: xcv (Leiden: Brill, 1999); and Peter Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 54 Veronika Pokorny, ‘Clementia Austriaca. Studien zur Bedeutung der Clementia Principis für die Habsburg im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 86 (1978), pp. 311–64; and Ricardo García Cárcel, ‘Los contrastes de Carlos V y Felipe II en la política cultural’, in Dos monarcas y una historia en común: España y Flandes bajo los reinados de Carlos V y Felipe II (Madrid: Sociedad estatal para la conmemoración de los centenarios de Felipe II y Carlos V, 2001), pp. 48–62. 55 Soen, ‘La Réitération de pardons collectifs à finalités politiques pendant la Révolte des Pays-Bas (1565–1598): Un Cas d’espèce dans les rapports de force aux Temps Modernes?’, in Préférant miséricorde à rigueur de justice. Pratiques de la grâce (xiii– xviie siècles), ed. by Bernard Dauven and Xavier Rousseaux (Louvain: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2012), pp. 97–123. 56 Soen, ‘C’estoit comme songe’. 57 Michel de Waele, ‘Un modèle de clémence? Le Duc d’Albe gouverneur des Pays-Bas, 1567–1573’, Cahiers d’Histoire, 16 (1996), pp. 21–32. 52

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of ‘clement victor’. By the end of July 1569, the Pope agreed to provide a papal pardon for the Netherlands and to give the Archbishop of Cambrai the competence to forgive repentant heretics, if they were prepared to accept the new Tridentine Formula of Faith. By November 1569, Philip II had finally signed a general pardon for his Dutch subjects: anyone prepared to reconcile themselves with the Catholic Church within three months could receive remission of his earlier crimes of lèse-majesté and heresy. Half a year later, on 16 July 1570, Alba publicly proclaimed this measure of grace. Not coincidentally, the Duke chose to promulgate the general pardon in the city of Antwerp. Most probably, he considered the pardon to be a symbolic coronation of his restoration of order and peace, just as Margaret had done with her ordinance for Antwerp. Every chronicle recounts the magnificence with which the ceremony took place. The papal pardon was first proclaimed in the newly inaugurated cathedral, in the presence of the new Antwerp bishop. During the papal mass, court preacher and Bishop of Arras François Richardot spoke widely on the advantages of the virtue of the classical clementia and the Christian misericordia.58 When in the afternoon the royal pardon was proclaimed at the city hall, the audience immediately complained about the many exceptions, once again equalling them to ‘the Inquisition’. As this rumour spread quickly through the city, it became clear that neither the mise-en-scène of papal forgiveness and royal clemency nor its concrete formulation in the read out ordinance met the expectations of Antwerp citizens. Most contemporary accounts report disillusionment regarding the many restrictions, even among the members of the Antwerp magistrate. Alba had to commission them to write a letter of thanks to the King stating that the general pardon was first published in their presence.59 The governor clearly expected a positive propagandistic effect from this letter of gratitude, yet support from other cities was scant.60 Despite the poor political reception of the measure, the new Antwerp bishop Sonnius reported an impressive number of reconciliati in the city: 14,128 in Antwerp, and 17,862 when the surrounding countryside was included.61 Marnef has used these impressive numbers to demonstrate the existence of religious middengroepen (‘middle groups’), which had not chosen clearly for one religion or the other. But above all, a letter of pardon offered restricted juridical protection, especially as Alba interpreted the pardon very rigidly: whoever did not profit from it was punished again. As such, the general pardon thus brought immunity of persecution for those who had procured a letter of pardon, but it did not bring reconciliation in the political sphere.62 The successful invasion of the insurgent Sea Beggars in Holland and Zeeland would fuel the Revolt from 1572 onwards. The governorship of Alba’s successor Luis de Requesens proved unsuccessful, for insurgents conquered more territory and royal François Richardot, Sermon, faict en église cathedrale d’Anvers en présence de […] Duc d’Alve, le jour de la publication des Pardons de leur Saincteté et Majesté Royale Catholique (Antwerp: Christoffel Plantijn, 1570). In particular, see. Janssens, ‘Superexcellat autem misericordia iudicium: The Homily of François Richardot on the Occasion of the Solemn Announcement of the General Pardon in the Netherlands (Antwerp, 16 July 1570)’, in Public Opinion and Changing Identities in the Early Modern Netherlands: Essays in Honour of Alastair Duke, ed.  by Pollmann and Spicer, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions: cxxi (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 107–23. 59 Antwerp Magistrate to Alba, 23 or 24/7/1570: SAA, Pk. 1.554 (General Pardon), piece 10/11; Alba to Antwerp magistrate, 24/7/1570: SAA, Pk. 1.554 (General Pardon), pieces 5/6/7. 60 Alba to Philip II, 09/10/1570: AGS, E. 545, 109, cf. EA, II, 443 and Gachard, CPhII, II, 154. 61 Sonnius to Alba: AGR PEA 271, fol. 257; Alba to Philip II, 7/11/1570: AGS, E. 545, fol. 120; or EA, dl. II, 456, cf. Gachard, CPhII, dl. II, 163; and Sonnius to Philip II, 15/10/1570: AGS, E. 545, fol.  105. ‘Escribenme los legados y subdelegados de las otras partes que ha sido tan grande el concurso de gente que venian se no se daban a manos a recibirlos’. 62 Alba to Philip II, 9/8/1570: AGS, E. 545, fol. 60, cf. Gachard, CPhII, II, 145. 58

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troops started mutinying. Especially after the Spanish Fury in November 1576, Antwerp became one of the main centres of resistance against Philip II, housing the seat of the rebel States-General and transforming into a Calvinist Republic during the governorships of Don Juan and Alexander Farnese. Reconquista and Reconciliation The governor-generalship of Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma (1543–92) and renowned besieger of the Antwerp Calvinist Republic, has been assessed in contradictory ways. In some accounts, inspired by a leyenda rosa, he appears as a clement peace dove;63 in others, he is depicted as a merciless Spanish conquistador. Son of former governor Margaret of Parma and Ottavio Farnese, the Italian prince spent a considerable time of his adolescence at the Spanish court. In 1578 he was appointed governor-general rather suddenly, after the unexpected death of Don Juan de Austria. Initially, he became associated with atrocities as cruel as those of the Duke of Alba, such as the sack of the small Brabantine city of Zichem in 1578 and, more importantly, of Maastricht in 1579. From 1581 onwards, he coordinated an impressive military campaign for the Spanish King against the Calvinist Republics in Flanders and Brabant. Even in the earliest accounts of the Dutch Revolt, his conquest of Antwerp in 1585 seemed to seal a separation of the Seventeen Provinces.64 As a result, in later historiography Farnese’s reconquista was equated with the Spanish recapture of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors. Despite this negative reputation, his campaign also gave birth to a more positive account, according to which Farnese won the Flemish and Brabantine cities by diplomacy and clemency, thus laying the foundation of ‘Belgian’ unity.65 Furthermore, the victory over the Antwerp Calvinist Republic after a long and painful siege of fourteen months itself confirms the dual pattern of reconquista and reconciliation.66 The capitulation treaty of 17 August 1585 explicitly stated that the Governor-General wanted to accept the citizens ‘en toute douceur et paternelle affection’ (‘with all mildness and paternal affection’), and that the treaty should seal reconciliation.67 Rather remarkably (and as had occurred previously during his campaign), Farnese was indeed willing to grant full pardon to conquered cities and citizens, and to restore old privileges

Leyenda rosa (‘pink legend’) is the term commonly used to refer to the endeavour of nuancing the leyenda negra (‘black legend’) by an overtly positive image of Spanish and Habsburg accomplishments. The expression was canonized by Ricardo García Carcel, La leyenda negra: Historia y opinion (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1998), though some still refer to a leyenda blanca (‘white legend’). Regarding Farnese specifically, this revisionism is discussed for example in Bart De Groof, ‘Alexander Farnese and the Origins of Modern Belgium’, Bulletin van het Belgisch Historisch Instituut te Rome, 63 (1993), pp. 195–221. 64 Jan Craeybeckx, ‘De val van Antwerpen en de scheuring der Nederlanden, gezien door de grote Noordnederlandse geschiedschrijvers van de eerste generatie’, in 1585: Op gescheiden wegen. Acta Colloquii Bruxellensis 22–23 XI 1985, ed. by. Craeybeckx and others (Leuven: Peeters, 1988), pp.  121–50; and Marnef, ‘Betreurd en/of gevierd: de val van Antwerpen (1585)’, in Het geheugen van de Lage Landen, ed. by Jo Tollebeek and Henk Te Velde (Rekkem: Ons Erfdeel, 2009), pp. 131–37. 65 Van der Essen, Alexandre Farnèse et les origines de la Belgique Moderne 1545–1592 (Brussels: Office de publicité, 1943). See also the remarks of contemporaries in James D. Tracy, ‘Princely Auctoritas or the Freedom of Europe: Justus Lipsius on a Netherlands Political Dilemma’, Journal of Early Modern History, 11 (2007), pp. 303–29. 66 Soen, ‘Reconquista and Reconciliation in the Dutch Revolt: The Campaign of Governor-General Alexander Farnese (1578–1592)’, Journal of Early Modern History, 16 (2012), pp. 1–22. 67 Articles et conditions dv Traicté faict et conclu entre l’Altesse du Prince de Parme […] d’vne part; et la ville d’Anvers, d’aultre part, le XVIJ iur d’Aoust l’an M.D.LXXXV (Antwerp: Christopher Plantin, 1585), K. 737. This treaty has been published in different versions and translations, see K. 738–45. 63

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in order to facilitate reconciliation with the King.68 While Alba had eschewed leniency, curbed city privileges, only selectively offered pardon to subdued cities, and reluctantly agreed to a general pardon,69 Farnese seemed to have learned lessons from his predecessor’s mistakes, and his military supremacy encouraged him to play the role of clement victor. The pardon clauses included in his capitulation treaties were cast as sign of a Forgiving Father’s virtues of ‘clemency’, just as in the general pardon of 1570. The reconciliation treaty offered citizens immunity from prosecution, the resumption of all their political and economic activities, and the return of any confiscated property. Farnese not only granted pardons more generously than Alba, he also offered ‘oubliance generalle & perpetuelle’ (‘full and eternal amnesty’), a kind of tentative amnesty. This ‘oubli du passé’ (‘forgetting of the past’) was an important means of forgiving and forgetting what had happened. In the French Wars of Religion it provided a tool for political and confessional reconciliation; in the Southern Netherlands it served as a means of forgetting the ‘heretic past’. In contrast, the political culture of the insurgents was very much founded upon the duty to spread tales of persecution and repression to keep the memory of these alive.70 The temporary approval of the ius emigrandi for Protestants has often been cited as the most concrete example of Spanish concessions during the campaign of Farnese, superseding mere rhetoric and the discourse of clemency. Some — but certainly not all — reconciliation treaties that Farnese had signed before had allowed Protestant citizens to stay longer in the reconquered city, and sometimes even permitted them to profess their religion privately as long as they did not cause a scandal. The Antwerp magistrate also negotiated hard on this point and obtained a ius emigrandi for four years, whereas Farnese had wanted to grant only three at the most. Protestant citizens also received permission to sell their property when they decided to emigrate, sometimes even quite some time after they had left. Those who wished to stay permanently, though, had to reconcile with the Catholic Church. These clauses in the capitulation treaties emphasized that the King did not want ‘le corps ni les biens’ (‘the body nor the property’) of his subjects and that he hoped to keep the economy running as smoothly as possible. The Antwerp treaty in particular mentioned that the King did not want to ‘depeupler ceste ville tant principalle fondee sur trafique et marchandise’ (‘depopulate this so important city based on transportation and merchandise’). Even if the ius emigrandi constituted only a temporary concession, its clauses were remarkable for many reasons. First, royal anti-heresy legislation had always prescribed the confiscation of goods and imprisonment of heretics, and had never allowed them to sell their goods while or after emigrating.71 Second, Philip II had always refused solutions that too closely resembled the Peace of Augsburg or other imperial concessions, and here they very much resembled the Abzugsrecht of that treaty.72 Third, when the King This conditional restoration of the old privileges can be found in the seventeenth article of the Antwerp capitulation treaty: ‘tant generaux que particulier, dont ils ont legitimement jouy avant ces troubles, leur seront punctuellement maintenus & gardés, pour en jouïr paisiblement & livrement, comme avant cesdits troubles’ (XVII). 69 Parker, ‘The Etiquette of Atrocity: The Laws of War in Early Modern Europe’, in Parker, Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 144–68. 70 Pollmann, Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands 1520–1635 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 125–30. 71 Aline Goosens, Les Inquisitions modernes dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux (1519–1633), 2  vols (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1997–98). 72 Weis, ‘La Paix d’Augsbourg’; Weis, Les Pays-Bas espagnols et les États du Saint Empire (1559–1579). Priorités et enjeux de la diplomatie en temps de troubles (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2003). 68

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had previously granted pardons, he had always insisted on prior reconciliation with the Catholic Church. The provisions of the ius emigrandi temporarily abandoned this condition, however, by only imposing conversion at the end of the reconciliation period. Farnese himself never gladly granted the right to leave; rather he was obliged to do so by his representatives at the negotiating table. Each time, the Governor-General asked the advice of bishops and theologians; whenever possible, he excluded the ius emigrandi clause.73 During the siege of Antwerp, he consulted not only the bishops of Mechelen and Antwerp, but also the papal nuncio Francisco Bonhomini.74 Despite the official pardon and reconciliation terms, Farnese still ordered inquiries for Protestants professing their faith publicly. Generally, Catholic priests and bishops were pleased with citizens’ supposed willingness to convert, especially when the number of conversions peaked at the end of the reconciliation period: five days after the end of the reconciliation period, the Antwerp Bishop Torrentius recorded 1500 conversions; some weeks later 1800; three months later 3000; and two years later 6000. While degrees of opportunism and abuse were unavoidable, the Bishop tried to punish (what he considered to be) fraud.75 The ultimate aim of the ius emigrandi accorded under the governorship of Farnese was to encourage conversion and reconciliation with the Catholic Church; to underpin a broader Catholic reform; and finally to implement Tridentine Catholicism. What seemed a generous concession in fide for the King and his Governor brought, of course, little comfort for Protestants: in the end, they still had to leave their city and sell their goods, and they received no formal recognition of their faith. When the offer of ius emigrandi was discussed during the peace negotiations of Breda in 1575 and of Cologne in 1579, it was vetoed by the insurgents as insufficient. In addition, the ‘Republican’ burgomaster Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde tried to convince Farnese that ‘real clemency’ consisted of permitting things that were against his heart and opinion, such as freedom of religion.76 According to Michel de Waele, the ‘clemency politics’ of Alexander Farnese were therefore ‘stronger’ than those of the French King Henri IV, whose clemency involved far-reaching concessions to the reformed.77 Still, during the reconciliation period, many Protestant and better-off citizens emigrated to the Northern Netherlands, the Holy Roman Empire, France, or England. The concession of the ius emigrandi proved, thus, detrimental to Farnese’s policy of reviving the economies of the reconquered cities as soon as possible, and proved especially disadvantageous for the Antwerp economy.78 Even so, this two-track policy managed to smooth the reconciliation process and to remove incentives for violent religious polarization after capitulation while enabling the rapid reconstruction of Church property and parishes.79 Farnese to Philip II, 21/05/1584: AGS E 588 fol. 32, cf. Lefèvre, CPh II, 477479 (1014). Marnef, ‘Reconquering a Rebellious City’; Van der Essen, Alexandre Farnèse: Prince de Parme, Gouverneur Général des Pays-Bas (1545–1592), 5 vols (Brussels: Librairie nationale d’art et d’histoire, 1932–37), I, pp. 114–16, 125–27. 75 Marie Jo Hendrikx, ‘De Reconciliatie te Antwerpen (1585–1600)’ (unpublished masters paper, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 1965), pp. 57–72. 76 Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde to Richardot, 14/07/1585: AGR PEA 586 fol. 30, cf. BCRH (3e s.) 9 349–52 (nr. 17). 77 Michel de Waele, ‘Entre concorde et intolérance: Alexandre Farnèse et la Pacification des Pays-Bas’, in De Michel de L’Hospital à l’édit de Nantes. Politique et religion face aux Églises, ed. by Thierry Wanegfellen (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2002), pp. 51–70. See also Mark Greengrass, Governing Passions, Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom, 1576–1585 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 78 Janssens, ‘Verjaagd van Nederland. Een overzicht van recent onderzoek over de Zuidnederlandse emigratie in de zestiende eeuw’, Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis, 75 (1995), pp. 103–20. 79 Pollmann, ‘Reconciliation and Atonement, 1585–1598’, in Catholic Identity, pp. 125–58; and Spicer, ‘After Iconoclasm’, pp. 431–32. 73 74

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Conclusions Numerous Spaniards in the Netherlands identified Antwerp as the focal point of the calamities. In April 1567, Spanish paymaster of the army Cristobal de Castellanos commented to a royal secretary in Madrid that the city at the River Scheldt had been ‘la fragua de todas las maldades que han succedido’ (‘the forge for all the malice that had occurred’).80 This communication highlighted the fact that not only many Spanish observers in the Netherlands, but also King Philip  II and his governors-general looked upon Antwerp as a crucial source of political and religious unrest during the Dutch Revolt. The city thus retained their particular attention throughout their general attempts to pacify the turmoil. It is striking that the governors-general Margaret of Parma, the Duke of Alba, and Alexander Farnese each dealt in an ‘exemplary’ way with the harbour city. Their aim was not only to induce Antwerp citizens to capitulate, but also to convince a wider swath of the population to do so, as the metropolis served as a news and information centre in early modern Europe. What happened in the microcosm of Antwerp might nonetheless be extrapolated to the macrocosm of the Dutch Revolt. The Habsburg governors shared an agenda to weaken urban opposition emboldened by the dukes of Burgundy. Moreover, they supported the aim of Charles  V and Philip  II to maintain the Seventeen Provinces exclusively Catholic. This resulted in a persistent political and religious repression, and this is the better-known part of the story. Their common longterm program often obscured that the Habsburg governors each pursued their general aim with very different measures, however. The great distances within the Spanish monarchy allowed the governors to be entrusted with a remarkable degree of manoeuvrability in their negotiations with the magistrate of Antwerp. Moreover, royal hesitancy and the King’s delegation of both decision-making and action ‘on the ground’ often enhanced the autonomy of the governors. As a result, in practice the concrete measures sur la pacification des troubles designed for Antwerp by the governors-general diverged notably in conception and consequences. After the Iconoclastic Fury, Margaret of Parma opted to mobilize troops, while provisionally moderating the existing legislation on heterodoxy. This military and legal strategy was in consonance with earlier events but was vetoed by Philip II and Alba. Thus under the governorship of Alba the rigid religious punishment according to the placards was reinstated, but a temporary general pardon was to enable reconciliation with the King and the Catholic Church. Instead of altering the legislation, as Margaret of Parma had attempted to do, the victory over William of Orange allowed for an exceptional period of grace which was to pave the way for order and peace. Though this general pardon seems to have induced a massive number of private reconciliations, it did not spark political reconciliation. Finally, after besieging the Antwerp Calvinist Republic, Alexander Farnese agreed to a capitulation treaty which provided both a general pardon and an oubliance generale (general amnesty), and allowed a four-year term for reconciliation with the Catholic Church. Unlike the legislation under Margaret and the pardon under Alba, prior formal reconciliation with the Church in order to reconcile with the King was temporarily removed from the stipulations. Each of these governors learned from predecessors and from the reactions of Antwerp 80

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citizens in future attempts to restore peace and order. In Habsburg policy towards the Dutch Revolt, its return thus resided in a mono-religious and monarchical organization of society. As in the French Wars of Religion, the quest for peace remained a policy with malleable meanings and measures.81 The large-scale emigration (which reduced Antwerp to half of its former population by 1590) did not stop either with the rather lenient legislation of Margaret or the pardon under Alba; it even gained in force after the relatively favourable legal provisions of the ius emigrandi under Farnese. Despite the differences in short-term legal stipulations, long-term effects remained the same. For those citizens who remained in Antwerp and were affected by these measures of appeasement, however, it meant the difference between keeping one’s property and having it confiscated — and even between life and death.

81 Penny Roberts, ‘The Languages of Peace during the French Religious Wars’, Cultural and Social History, 4  (2007),

pp. 293–311.

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Printing the Female Ruler Nicolas Hogenberg’s Death of Margaret of Austria (1531)* Olenka Horbatsch Department of Prints and Drawings, The British Museum

Printed images played an increasingly important role in the self-fashioning of the early modern Hapsburg rulers, following Emperor Maximilian  I’s extensive woodcut projects in the first quarter of the sixteenth century.1 Prints became an important communicator of courtly concerns and fostered a greater degree of exchange between courtly and civic audiences. In the context of grander artistic projects of the ruling nobility, circulating prints fostered innovative modes of representation and afforded broader access than did sitespecific monuments or courtly collections. By the second quarter of the sixteenth century, courtly prints had become an important locus of technical and stylistic experimentation in the Low Countries. The courtly setting proved to be fertile ground for the innovation and diffusion of etchings, which were characterized by limited print runs and were of an experimental nature. Early etchings in the Netherlands were not a ‘failed experiment’,2 as they are often characterized, but rather represented a promising (albeit brief ) project that held interest for courtly and civic audiences alike, and that provided points of contact between these two social realms. A series of prints depicting the death of Maximilian I’s daughter, Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), represents an important case study of prints as facilitators of exchange between courtly and civic contexts. Nicolas Hogenberg — born in Munich in 1500; died in Mechelen before 1539 — executed the commemorative series of four etchings of Margaret of Austria’s death (1531), which was a posthumous and public extension of her own artistic patronage. As Regent of the Netherlands (1507–15; 1519–30), Margaret of Austria was a renowned patron of the arts: her commissions included devotional diptychs, illuminated manuscripts, portraits, and family tombs. Margaret strategically used these artistic genres to legitimize her right to rule by signalling her dynastic ties and by emphasizing her identity as I would like to thank Ethan Matt Kavaler for his valuable suggestions and encouragement, Anne-Laure Van Bruaene for her helpful comments, and Amyrose McCue Gill for her assistance with editing. 1 These projects include the Triumphal Arch (c.  1515–18), the Triumphal Procession (1516–18), and the Triumphal Chariot (1522). See Larry Silver, Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 8–13, 82–108; and Larry Silver, ‘Triumphs and Travesties: Printed Processions of the Sixteenth Century’, in Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer and Titian, ed. by Silver and Elizabeth Wyckoff (Wellesley, MA: Davis Museum and Cultural Center, 2009), pp. 18–23. 2 This term was first employed in David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 332–36. *

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 187-205. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114008

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a devout widow.3 Unlike her own commissions, which were accessible only to esteemed visitors to her Mechelen residence or to her family mausoleum at Brou in the Duchy of Savoy, the print series circulated throughout the Low Countries and allowed for the communal veneration of Margaret’s body politic. Hogenberg’s print series can be conceptualized as a portable, miniature counterpart to realized monuments and tombs that had been erected to Margaret’s memory. The print series was in dialogue with these permanent, built monuments, and investigating these inter-medial connections sheds light on important stylistic and visual aspects of the series. Jill Bepler has employed the term ‘paper monument’ in her discussion of illustrated early modern funerary sermons of the German nobility. She has demonstrated how such paper monuments preserved the memory of the deceased, functioning in a different way from realized tombs or other funerary sculpture.4 In presenting Hogenberg’s series of the death of Margaret of Austria as a ‘paper monument’, one that represents a historic event through diverse but gender-specific constructions of the early modern death ritual, I hope to better account for the role of printed images in the formation and maintenance of the ideal female ruler. This paper examines the series as a cohesive whole in order to explore how these scenes of death and mourning functioned in the commemoration and visual afterlife of the Regent. I consider how visual, technical, and stylistic aspects of Hogenberg’s prints evoked specific political and devotional associations for the contemporary viewer. In seeking to reconstruct the visual and stylistic traditions informing the print series and their significance, I  will examine gender-specific images as well as rituals of death and mourning in relation to Margaret’s broader artistic patronage and the court milieu. In the absence of documentation pertaining to the commission and production of the series, I  will use technical and literary data to propose circumstances of viewership. Whereas earlier literature has focused on reconstructing the lost panel paintings on which the prints might have been based, I want to suggest that the prints themselves are an early antecedent to the history of reproductive etchings and that they represent a case study of the possibilities afforded by this new technique in mediating the relationship between courtly and civic audiences. Hogenberg’s series, as noted above, consists of four etchings of the death of Margaret of Austria: Margaret on her deathbed with attendants (Figure 1, 32.2 × 23.0 cm); the public veneration of her body (Figure 2, 33.0 × 23.5 cm); Margaret in prayer framed by antique architecture (Figure  3, 32.8  ×  23.5 cm); and her recumbent body encased in a fictive antique mausoleum, and surrounded by statues and coats of arms (Figure  4, 32.7 × 23.7 cm). Hogenberg’s prints have been connected to a series of four panel paintings

On Margaret of Austria’s artistic patronage, see Dagmar Eichberger, ‘A Renaissance Princess Named Margaret: Fashioning a Public Image in a Courtly Society’, Melbourne Art Journal, 4:4 (2000), 4–24; and Eichberger, Leben mit Kunst, Wirken durch Kunst: Sammelwesen und Hofkunst unter Margarete von Österreich, Regintin der Niederlande (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 22–45. 4 Jill Bepler, ‘Women in German Funeral Sermons: Models of Virtue or Slice of Life?’, German Life and Letters, 44:5 (1991), 392–403. For an example of a paper monument to a humanist in early sixteenth-century Augsburg, see Ashley West, ‘Hans Burgkmair the Elder (1473–1531) and the Visualization of Knowledge’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2006), pp. 16–24. 3

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Fig. 1: Nicolas Hogenberg, Deathbed of Margaret of Austria, 1531, etching, 32.2 × 23.0 cm. © Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels. Inventory number: SI-1632.

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Fig. 2: Nicolas Hogenberg, Veneration of Margaret of ­Austria’s Body, 1531, etching, 33.0 × 23.5 cm. © Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels. Inventory number: SI-1633.

Fig. 3: Nicolas Hogenberg, Margaret of Austria in Prayer, 1531, etching, 32.8 × 23.5 cm. © Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels. Inventory number: SI-1631

(now lost) on the basis of an extant seventeenth-century manuscript.5 The manuscript recounts the inventory of the Annonciades convent in Bruges, which Margaret founded in 1517 and where she planned to retire. Margaret bequeathed artworks (including a portrait of herself by Bernard von Orley) and sums of money to the convent in order to commemorate her role as founder. Among the artworks listed in the manuscript are four paintings of the ‘death and agony of Madame’, showing the Regent’s death, her stately body, the Regent in prayer, and her mausoleum.6 Ghislaine De Boom has argued that Hogenberg’s print series reproduce the paintings and that the four paintings originally formed two diptychs.7 Unfortunately, the contents of the Annonciades convent were lost when the building was destroyed in the eighteenth century, thus the Brussels manuscript and De Boom’s exposition provide vital contextual information.8

Ghislaine De Boom and A.  J.  J. Delen, ‘Gravures Concernant Marguerite d’Autriche’, Revue Belge d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’Art, 2 (1932) 41–48 (pp. 154–56); and Royal Library of Brussels, MSS 15862–63, Vie de Marguerite d’Autriche, iiii, ‘L’Institution de l’orde des Annuntiates et la foundation de ce cloister [à Bruges en 1517 par Marguerite d’Austriche]’, fols 24r–34v. See also Joseph van den Gheyn and others, Catalogue des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, vii (Brussels: H. Lamterin, 1907), p. 429 n. 5042. 6 De Boom and Delen, ‘Gravures’, p. 41; and as in MSS 15862–63 Vie de Marguerite d’Austriche, iiii, fol. 25v. 7 De Boom and Delen, ‘Gravures’, p. 44. 8 Whereas De Boom suggested that the original paintings formed two diptychs, Alfred  M.  M. Dekker has proposed that they formed a single triptych with the four paintings making up the outer and inner wings, which would have framed a religious scene, possibly of Saint Margaret. See Dekker, Janus Secundus (1511–1536) De tekstoverlevering van het tijdens zijn leven gepubliceerde werk (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1986), p. 175. 5

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Fig. 4: Nicolas Hogenberg, Mausoleum of Margaret of Austria, 1531, etching, 32.7 × 23.7 cm. © Royal Library of ­Belgium, Brussels. Inventory number: SI-1634.

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The exact relation between the now-lost paintings and the extant prints, however, cannot be determined. Interpreting the prints as a reproduction or replica of the paintings disregards important changes implicit in the transfer between media, style, and dimensions. While reproductive prints were to become the mainstay of the printmaking industry by mid-century, Hogenberg’s series represents an early chapter in the history of reproductive printmaking — if, indeed, it served this function. The technique of etching was still in its nascent years: the earliest examples on copper from the Netherlands date to 1520.9 Hogenberg was among the first printmakers in the Netherlands to produce etchings, a technique that was not seamlessly integrated into broader print production until the second half of the sixteenth century. The artistic style of the series is also noteworthy, as it incorporates burgeoning ideas about the antique mode. The last two prints of the series include Latin epitaphs written by the Netherlandish humanist poet Janus Secundus (1511–36) and are set within ornamented antique architectural frames. While the antique style had come to represent power and authority among the high nobility, ideas about its use were still very much in flux during the 1530s. Leading patrons were concurrently commissioning ‘modern’ or Late Gothic works alongside those in the ‘antique’ or Italianate style.10 Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s translations of architectural treatises by Vitruvius and Sebastiano Serlio, published in Antwerp by 1539, provided a standardized account of the canonical orders of classical architecture.11 Yet practice did not seamlessly follow prescription: indeed, during the decades when these early architectural treatises were being disseminated, fluid and disparate conceptions of antiquity continued to be propagated through microarchitecture, buildings, woodwork, and prints.12 The novel elements of Hogenberg’s prints — including reproductive printmaking, the etching technique, and the antique mode — did not immediately take root; their integration into broader Netherlandish artistic production would be gradual and sporadic throughout the sixteenth century. Notions of the antique continued to develop throughout the century, and etching would only become the technique of choice for the painter-engraver after 1600. Hogenberg’s print series thus indexes and anticipates important aspects of Netherlandish printmaking at a critical time in its early history. The complete series survives in the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels, where the latter two prints exist in unicum. The former two prints, depicting the death and mourning of Margaret, are also housed in the British Museum in London. While all four prints in the

On the first etchings in the Netherlands, see Christian von Heusinger, ‘Karl V.  von Gossaert’, Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorisches Museums Wien, 2 (2001), 58–72. 10 Ethan Matt Kavaler, ‘Being the Count of Nassau: Refiguring Identity in Space, Time, and Stone’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 46 (1995), 13–51 (p. 28). 11 Krista De Jonge, ‘The First Reception of the Antique’, in Unity and Discontinuity: Architectural Relationships Between the Southern and Northern Low Countries (1530–1700), ed.  by De Jonge and Konrad Ottenheym (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 15–86 (p. 17). 12 I am grateful to Ethan Matt Kavaler for his suggestions regarding Netherlandish microarchitecture in the 1530s and 1540s. For a discussion of the single-sheet architectural engravings as a site of experimentation in the wake of architectural treatises, see Michael J. Waters, ‘A Renaissance without Order: Ornament, Single-Sheet Engravings, and the Mutability of Architectural Prints’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 71.4 (2012), 488–523. 9

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series are unsigned, they have been generally attributed to Hogenberg since 1929.13 The first two prints are not dated whereas the latter pair are dated 1531, a date that has been accepted for the entire series.14 Interest in the print series during the early twentieth century focused on questions of authorship and attribution, guided by archiv al discoveries.15 A. E. Popham attributed the series to Hogenberg, based on similarities in composition and technique with Hogenberg’s signed Charles  V frieze.16 Popham further divided Hogenberg’s output into two categories: his earlier work (1522–25), characterized by small-scale etchings and engravings of religious figures, and his later work (1530 onwards), characterized by larger-scale etchings of court subjects that indicate an increased interest in the Italian figural style.17 Since Popham’s study, Hogenberg has been accepted as the artist of the series, and yet stylistic and technical evidence suggests that a different artist was responsible for executing the latter two prints. Indeed, the distinctly lighter style and linear handling of the latter two prints contrast with the atmospheric effects and dark manner of etching of the first two prints.18 These significant changes are not merely the result of differing subject matter: Hogenberg, who etched the first two plates, may have designed the series and allocated to another printmaker the task of executing the remaining two plates. In the text that follows, I refer to Hogenberg as the author of the series while acknowledging that another printmaker may very well have been responsible for actually etching the final two prints. The series has remained largely overlooked in subsequent scholarship, even as the art patronage of Margaret of Austria has received increased attention in recent years.19 The few existing accounts view the non-conventional subject matter through the rubric of realism, citing these prints to be an accurate representation of the Regent’s final hours. There had been no direct precedent in the northern visual tradition for serial prints depicting the death of a female ruler. Perhaps because the subjects depart from established conventions, scholars have implicitly read the representations as accurate accounts of the historical moment. The seemingly intimate portrayals in the first two prints (the death and veneration of Margaret) have been interpreted from the perspective of Margaret’s biography. In two recent exhibitions of Burgundian-Hapsburg art and patronage, the prints have been cited in connection with the Regent’s final letter to Charles V, which

Arthur  Ewart Popham, ‘Etchings of Margaret of Austria by Hogenberg and Van Orley’, Print Collector’s Quarterly, 16  (1929), 278–86. Popham’s attributions have been accepted in the more recent scholarly literature, including Jozef Duverger, ‘Vorstellingen von Margareta von Oosterrijk in tekeningen, prenten en boekillustratie’, De Gulden Paser: Jaarboek van de Vereniging der Antwerpse Bibliophielen, 52 (1974), 95–114. The series has been exhibited recently under Hogenberg’s name. See Women of Distinction: Margaret of York/Margaret of Austria, ed. by Eichberger (Mechelen: Lamot, 2005), p. 85 n.  21; and Bob van den Boogert and Jacqueline Kerkhoff, Maria van Hongarije: Koningen tussen keizers en kunstenaars 1505–1558 (Utrecht: Rijksmuseum het Catharijneconvent; s’Hertogenbosch: Noordbrabantsmuseum, 1993), p. 141 n. 103. 14 Popham, ‘Etchings’, p. 282. 15 This scholarship was based upon Emmanuel Neeffs’s archival research in Mechelen and Max J. Friedländer’s discussion of the life and work of Hogenberg. See Neeffs, Histoire de la peinture et de la sculpture à Malines (Ghent: Eug. Vanderhaeghen, 1876); and Friedländer, ‘Nicolas Hogenberg und Frans Crabbe, die Maler von Mechelen’, Jahrbuch der Preuszischen Kunstsammlungen, 42 (1921), 161–68. 16 Popham, ‘Etchings’, p. 284. 17 Popham notes that the bearded figure in the deathbed print, who appears with his hand upon his heart, advancing with dynamic motion from the right, recalls a figure in Lambert Lombard’s painting of the Annunciation to the Shepherds. Lombard’s painting postdates Hogenberg’s print; thus Popham postulates that both compositions could be based on Raphael’s design, possibly transmitted through prints circulating in the north. See Popham, ‘Etchings’, p. 284. 18 I am grateful to Joris Van Grieken for this suggestion. 19 See Women of Distinction, ed. by Eichberger; and Eichberger, Leben mit Kunst. 13

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she wrote on her deathbed, and have therefore been understood as a visual record of a historic event.20 I want to stress, however, that the prints are not an accurate representation of the Regent’s final hours but depend, rather, on pre-existing and gender-specific visual traditions. The first two prints invoke representations of the death of the Virgin through compositional and iconographical allusions that served to heighten the parallel between the Regent and the Virgin for devotional and political purposes. The formal language of these two prints stems from a long-standing tradition of deathbed imagery, and would likely have signalled these associations to the contemporary viewer. The death of the Virgin was a common subject in northern printmaking, either on its own or as part of a serial representation of the life of the Virgin. Comparing Hogenberg’s first two prints (the deathbed and public veneration of Margaret’s body) with prints of the death of the Virgin, such as the famous engraving by Martin Schongauer and the woodcut by Albrecht Dürer (Figure 5), reveals obvious similarities.21 In both German compositions, the Virgin’s deathbed is situated at the centre, encircled by attendants. Schongauer depicts the bed slightly on an angle, and Dürer elevates it onto a platform in order to represent the Virgin’s entire body without drastic foreshortening. In the first print of Hogenberg’s series, showing the deathbed of the Regent, the bed is also represented in skewed perspective. While the objects in the room — the miniature altar, ceiling, and bed frame — have been rendered according to a consistent perspectival system, the foot of the Regent’s bed has been lowered in order to make her body visually accessible to the mourners at her feet. This serves to lay bare the subject to the viewer, without interference from objects or figures in the room. The Regent’s body, partially covered, thus directly confronts the viewer, serving as an organizing principle for the various groups of figures that surround her on all sides. Hogenberg’s print draws on the German examples, which show a marked interest in emphasizing the ­importance of the body as a site of personal devotion. There are, of course, further similarities between Hogenberg’s print and the German examples: the canopied beds with knotted curtains; the kneeling and gesticulating onlookers; the figures reading books; and those bearing candles and crucifixes. Hogenberg’s representation of Margaret’s death draws on compositional strategies of the death of the Virgin imagery and, as we shall see, imbues the devotional motifs with political significance. These references to conventional visual programs indicate that Hogenberg’s prints present a religious allusion rather than an unmediated historical moment. Representing the death of a contemporary female figure in the guise of the death of the Virgin, moreover, had a near-contemporary precedent in Albrecht Dürer’s 1504 illumination of the death of Willibald Pirckheimer’s wife Crescentia (Figure 6).22 Indeed, the crucifix, the candle, and the praying attendants around the canopied bed accord with Hogenberg’s representation of the final moments of the Regent. Mourning imagery 20 Women of Distinction, ed. by Eichberger, p. 85 n. 21; and Van den Boogert and Kerkhoff, Maria van Hongarije, p. 141 n. 103. 21 Martin Schongauer, Death of the Virgin, c.  1470s. Engraving, 25.5  ×  16.9 cm. Colmar, Musée d’Unterlinden. For a reproduction, see Der Hübsche Martin: Kupferstiche und Zeichnungen von Martin Schongauer, ed.  by Pantxika Béguerie (Colmar: Unterlinden Museum, 1991), pp. 266–67, no. K.9. 22 Michael Roth, Dürer’s Mutter: Schönheit, Alter und Tod im Bild der Renaissance (Berlin: Kupferstichkabinett, 2006), p. 65 n. 31

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Fig. 5: Albrecht Dürer, Death of the Virgin (from Life of Virgin Series), 1510, woodcut, 29.2 × 20.6 cm. © Trustees of the British Museum. Registration number: 1895,0122.638

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was heavily standardized in the early modern era, as representations had to cohere with contemporary notions of preparedness for death, enacted by the praying attendants at the scene.23 While candles, crucifixes, and praying attendants were also employed for the death of male rulers, as seen in illuminations of Margaret mourning her husband Philibert in Jean Lemaire de Belges’ La Couronne Margaritique (1504–05), the association with the Virgin was here reserved for representations of Margaret.24 As attendants gather to mourn the death of her husband, Margaret is represented in the guise of the swooning Virgin in depictions of the Crucifixion.25 Marian parallels with the Regent cohered with Margaret’s own cultural policy, and Dagmar Eichberger has demonstrated how Marian devotion and imagery held special significance in the Regent’s patronage and devotional practices.26 In addition to commissioning and receiving Marian works for private devotion, including illuminated manuscripts and painted diptychs, Margaret also supported religious organizations dedicated to the Virgin. She endowed two such religious orders in Bruges: the lay confraternity of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin and the Convent of the Annonciades; she furnished the latter with artworks including a Pietà sculpted by Conrad Meit and polychromed by Bernard van Orley, and an altarpiece of the death of the Virgin.27 The original paintings of the death of Margaret of Austria, upon which Hogenberg’s prints may have been based, hung at the Annonciades convent and would have offered a striking parallel to the Marian imagery throughout the institution. Moreover, Mary was a particularly apt model for Margaret of Austria, who emphasized her identity as a devout widow in all of her official representations after her second husband’s death. While Hogenberg’s print series was commissioned posthumously, likely by a member of Margaret’s court, the representation of the Regent’s death thus accorded with the Marian program that Margaret commissioned during her lifetime. Structuring the representation of Margaret’s death after that of the Virgin allowed for devotional parallels to be drawn, and this visual precedent also gave mourners and attendants a place of importance. The principal textual source of the death of the Virgin, Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (c.  1260), recounts that Christ’s apostles gathered around the Virgin’s bed in prayer. In Hogenberg’s first two prints, mourners and attendants are given a prominent position such that court dignitaries are cast into the role of apostles — as are viewers of the print series, by proxy. Read within this framework of visual references, suggestions to the death of the Virgin structured the viewing experience through important devotional and political allusions. The print medium allowed for alternate representations of the historical event, and included several important deviations from built monuments to Margaret’s memory. Comparing representations of Margaret in Hogenberg’s print series to the tomb effigies in her mausoleum reveals important and unexpected differences: from regent’s regalia to widow’s garb, and from Late Gothic tracery to antique frames, the print series recasts Margaret’s Nigel Llewellyn, The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual, c.  1500–c.  1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), p. 18. 24 See Marie Madeleine Fontaine, ‘Olivier de la Marche and Jean Lemaire de Belges’, in Women of Distinction, ed.  by Eichberger, pp. 221–29. 25 See Women of Distinction, ed.  by Eichberger, pp.  226–27, for reproductions of the Death of Philibert and Margaret Mourning from Jean Lemaire de Belges, La Couronne Margaritique, 1504–05, Austrian National Library, Codex 3441, fols 21v, 14v. 26 Eichberger, Leben mit Kunst, pp. 206–28. 27 Eichberger, Leben mit Kunst, p. 225. 23

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Fig. 6: After Albrecht Dürer, The Death of Crescentia Pirckheimer, 1504, pen on parchment, 20.3 × 13.9 cm. © ­Kupferstichkabinett. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. KdZ number: 23319.

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death in alternate visual and stylistic terms. Like the mausoleum, the series aims to honour and preserve the ruler’s memory. However, the etchings are far from a printed ‘translation’ of the mausoleum; rather, they evoke several different media-specific conventions, including tomb sculpture, microarchitecture, and devotional painting. The graphic medium, together with the serial format of the prints, facilitates such a hybrid composition. The print series is thus in dialogue with Margaret’s mausoleum, offering as it does an alternate memorialization of Margaret’s death. One of the most significant contrasts between representations of Margaret of Austria in the print series and in her tomb is the depiction of her body. Margaret commissioned the royal monastery of Brou, built between 1506 and 1532, to house the tombs of her deceased husband, Philibert of Savoy; her mother-in-law, Margaret of Bourbon; and herself. Margaret’s tomb, designed by the Flemish artists Jan van Roome and Loys van Boghem, includes effigies of both her earthly and stately bodies by the court sculptor Conrad Meit.28 Although Margaret retained her identity as a devout widow in all official visual representations — painted portraits and illuminated manuscripts — she departed from this model in her upper effigy at Brou. Margaret chose to be represented in full regalia, exchanging her widow’s weeds for her duchess’s crown and dress. It has been argued that, following her regency, Margaret altered her tomb plans from a double tomb with her husband to a freestanding monument, in order to reflect her new public role as regent.29 In this context, then, her identity as Regent of the Netherlands and Duchess of Savoy was stressed over that of widow or mourner. The four prints in Hogenberg’s series, however, present Margaret as a widow. In the depiction of her deathbed, of the veneration of her body, and of her imaginary funerary monuments, she appears consistently in her widow’s weeds. Margaret’s choice of transi tombs, of course, mandated the portrayal of both the earthly and the stately bodies of Duke Philibert and herself.30 Transi tombs, such as the ones at Brou, functioned to establish permanent images of the body politic, thereby asserting the survival of the social and political role of the ruler when faced with the death of its present occupant. Naturally, only a few viewers might ever actually see the physical tomb of the ruler, especially considering that the Hapsburg Empire was steadily acquiring new territories.31 Located in the Savoyard territory of her former husband, Margaret’s tomb was particularly inaccessible to most Netherlanders. Nevertheless, it can help us conjecture how Hogenberg’s print series might have functioned. We might consider the print of Margaret’s deathbed as For an overview of the tombs, see Ethan Matt Kavaler, ‘Margaret of Austria: Ornament and the Court Style at Brou’ in Artists at Court: Image-Making and Identity, 1300–1550, ed. Stephen J. Campbell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 124–37 (p. 125). 29 Laura D. Gelfland, ‘Margaret of Austria and the Encoding of Power in Patronage: The Funerary Foundation at Brou’, in Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Allison Levy (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 145–49. See also Alexandra Carpino, ‘Margaret of Austria’s Funerary Complex at Brou: Conjugal Love, Political Ambition, or Personal Glory?’, in Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs, ed. by Cynthia Lawrence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 37–52. 30 Ernst Kantorowicz has expounded the function of the transi tomb within medieval political theory, which holds that the king or ruler possessed two bodies: the body natural, which was susceptible to the vicissitudes of death and decay, and the body politic, which represented the office of the ruler, and lived on after death. Kantorowicz argues that this dual representation of rulers on tombs was likely based on funeral processions, which included both the deceased body and an effigy. See Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A  Study of Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 11–12. 31 M.  J. Rodriquez-Salgado, ‘Charles V and his Dynasty’, in Charles V 1500–1558 and his Time, ed.  by Hugo Soly (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1999), pp. 27–111 (p. 32). 28

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representing her earthly body, and the print of her veneration as representing her stately body. Although Margaret stipulated that her tomb effigy was to show her as a duchess, the printed series of her death consistently constructed her identity as devout widow, a familiar and comforting image to the citizens of the Low Countries and one that resonated with Marian overtones. This more conventional representation was not one that stressed Margaret’s agency as regent and was, consequently, more appropriate after her death. The architectural style employed for Margaret’s tomb at Brou is also significant. Initially designed in what appears to have been an antique manner, she eventually chose instead a Late Gothic mode: she first engaged the French artists Jean Perréal and Michel Colombe (who had just completed an antique-style monument for Francis II of Brittany) but soon replaced them with the Netherlandish painter Jan van Roome and the local architect Loys van Boghem.32 One of the most striking disparities between Hogenberg’s last two prints and the Brou tomb is thus the differing architectural mode. The latter two prints of the series depict Margaret in prayer and her recumbent body, accompanied by coats of arms and Latin epitaphs, and enclosed by antique architectural frames. Previous accounts have denigrated the architectural elements as ‘decorative’ or ‘ornamental’ and have prioritized Secundus’s texts and the representations of the Regent over the frames.33 Such interpretations reflect art historical biases that favour figural elements over ornamental details, but the architectural language cannot simply be considered secondary to the figural and textual elements in the prints: architecture, too, plays a significant role in both the composition and the construction of meaning. Margaret is depicted kneeling in prayer at a prie-dieu in the third print of the series, set within an antique frame composed of two columns and entablature, replete with garlands, swirls, and other ornament. Underneath the figural scene, two pilaster bases frame a Latin poem by Secundus. The fourth print depicts Margaret’s deceased body lying in repose in the bottom register, framed by a similar antique architectural construct. These fictive architectural spaces that simultaneously suggest and deny the representation of believable space help to organize the composition as a whole. Moreover, their antique style carried important associations of power and nobility, and marked a distinct departure from the Late Gothic manner of Margaret’s tomb at Brou. The shift of representational style from Late Gothic to antique was equally important as a public statement: the prints of Margaret’s monument and mausoleum, set within fictional antique spaces, can be seen as literal re-framings of the Regent’s death in the pan-European antique. This reframing of Margaret’s death extended beyond Hogenberg’s print series. Two monuments commissioned upon Margaret’s death by her nephew, Charles V, indicate that there was a wider interest in representing the Regent in the antique mode. One of these — a structure to contain Margaret’s heart — was erected in the Annonciades convent in Bruges, possibly fulfilling Margaret’s own plans.34 We know that this work, which was destroyed in 1578, was made of alabaster and included gold statues. A preparatory drawing, attributed to Lancelot Blondeel, shows Margaret kneeling in prayer in an antique niche Kavaler, ‘Margaret of Austria’, pp. 129–30. Delen, Histoire de la Gravure dans les anciens Pay Bas et dans les Provinces Belges (Paris: F de Nobele, 1969) pp. 39–41. Jane de Iongh, Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, trans. by M. D. Herter Norton (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954), p. 212.

32 33 34

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with her patron saint.35 A second commemorative monument, which held Margaret’s viscera, stood in Saint Peter’s Church in Mechelen.36 An anonymous drawing, which may represent the Mechelen monument, shows a similar composition with Margaret kneeling in prayer in an antique niche.37 By 1531, the antique mode had been generally adopted as a courtly style, one associated with conquest and empire. The Netherlandish nobility had begun commissioning antique monuments during the previous decade although, as noted above, both Late Gothic and antique would continue to find patrons until the early 1540s.38 The interest in re-framing Margaret’s death, therefore, responded to broader associations between the antique mode and political power. Clearly Hogenberg chose the antique manner to reframe Margaret’s death in what had by then become a pan-European language of power and authority. Prints more easily allowed for variation in and new invention of architectural settings — as well as other matters of design — than did expensive and monumental works of stone. The architectural frames in the final two prints of the series also served an important structural role, imputing coherence to the diverse components of their pictorial fields. The antique frames anchor the texts, figures, and heraldic devices both spatially and compositionally. Ethan Matt Kavaler has suggested that the architecture of Margaret’s tomb at Brou had a communicative function that helped to organize profuse visual material for the viewer by highlighting significant areas and associating disparate elements through the repetition of motifs.39 These communicative and structural aspects of architecture had a parallel in French literature c.  1460–1520, which employed architectural metaphors to frame and order their allegorical narratives. This literary trope held particular appeal at court and might thus be seen as part of the same cultural world as architectural commissions.40 We might consider Hogenberg’s architectural frames in a similar light: they serve to unite important aspects of the ruler’s death and memory, including her kneeling and recumbent effigies, the Latin epitaphs glorifying her name, and the heraldic devices signifying her genealogy and dominion. Furthermore, their antique architectural language related the prints to similarly ornamented monuments to Margaret in Bruges and Mechelen — as well as to works representing rulers and the high nobility throughout Europe. The third print in Hogenberg’s series further demonstrates the complex relationship between monuments fictive and real. While the antique frame and Latin poem mimic the form of a carved epitaph, the representation of the praying Regent is set within a detailed interior more akin to Flemish devotional painting. The interior is furnished Lancelot Blondeel, design for monument to Margaret of Austria, mid-sixteenth century. Pen drawing with wash on paper, 27.5  ×  16.1 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet, museum number RP–T–1953–343(R). See Van den Boogert and Kerkhoff, Maria van Hongarije, p. 270 n. 177; and Bruges and the Renaissance: Memling to Pourbus, ed. by M. P. J. Maartens and others (Ludion: Stichting Kunstboek, 1998), p. 184 n. 88. 36 Women of Distinction, ed. by Eichberger, pp. 86. 37 Anonymous, Possible drawing for funerary monument to Margaret of Austria, 1555. Pen drawing on paper, 40 × 26 cm. Mechelen, Stedelijke Musea, inv. no. G/12. See Women of Distinction, ed. by Eichberger, pp. 86 n. 22. 38 Kavaler, ‘Being the Count of Nassau’, p. 28. 39 Kavaler, ‘Margaret of Austria’, p. 128. 40 David Cowling, Building the Text: Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 7. See also Michael Randall, ‘The Flamboyant Design of Jean Lemaire de Belges’ La Concorde des deux langages’, L’Esprit Createur, 28 (1988), 13–24. 35

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with a prie-dieu, an altar, and an opened triptych, and perspectival coherence is suggested through the recessed ceiling, suspended cloth of honour, and hanging light. While transi tombs sometimes included effigies of the deceased kneeling in prayer, the detailed interior in Hogenberg’s print recalls Flemish paintings where religious figures were situated within domestic interiors.41 The print thus mimics and merges distinct media-specific conventions by uniting sepulchral forms with an illusionistic interior reminiscent of devotional painting. The print medium facilitated such fluid and hybrid fictive monuments that blurred the boundaries among conventional representations. The literary context of the print series merits further consideration. Latin epitaphs, composed by Secundus, are found on the latter two prints of Hogenberg’s series. The network of poets, humanists, and publishers in Mechelen sheds important light on possible audiences and functions of Hogenberg’s series. The poems were part of a larger literary enterprise that sought to commemorate the death of the Regent. Stemming from a courtly context of historical and commemorative poetry, these literary projects quickly circulated among important city centres in the Low Countries. In the absence of documentation pertaining to the commission of the print series, this literary context provides vital information and illustrates how printed texts facilitated a closer degree of contact between courtly and civic audiences. Secundus lived in Mechelen between 1528 and 1532, where he was in contact with important literary and artistic figures at Margaret’s court, including his brother, Nicolaus Grudius, and the artists Conrad Meit and Hogenberg. Best known for his amatory poems, the Basia, which are addressed by Giancarlo Fiorenza in this volume, Secundus also composed political odes, epigrams, and funeral poetry for the ruling nobility including Margaret of Austria and Charles V. Two of his poems commemorate Margaret’s death (Funerals 4 and 5), and are printed on the fourth and third print in Hogenberg’s series, respectively. Secundus displayed a keen interest in contemporary Netherlandish art: he praised the antique alabaster altarpiece of Jean Mone in Halle as ‘elegantly carved’ in 1534.42 While the poet’s direct role in the print series cannot be ascertained, his extant travel inventories record his interest in antique royal tombs, particularly those of Charles VIII and Louis XII in Saint Denis.43 Secundus’s knowledge of current artistic modes and visual commemoration, together with his political poems for the Mechelen court, makes it likely that he collaborated directly with Hogenberg on the print series. Secundus’s poems are part of a much broader literary phenomenon dedicated to commemorating Margaret of Austria’s death. The proclamation of her passing, Complaincte faicte pour Madam Marguerite, written by French chronicler Nicaise Ladam, was already published cum privilegio in 1530, shortly after the Regent’s death on 1 December.44 Cornelius Agrippa von Nettisheim’s eulogy was printed in Antwerp in 1531, and Such as Joos van Cleve’s Annunciation, c. 1525, oil on wood, 86.4 × 80 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession No. 32.100.60. 42 Paul Saintenoy, Le Statuaire Jean Mone, Jean Money, maitre artiste de Charles-Quint, sa vie, ses oeuvre (Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, 1931), p. 37. 43 Jean Second, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. by Roland Guillot, v (Paris: Champion, 2005), p. 215. Secundus was also active as a sculptor and medallist, and struck portrait medallions of Charles V and local nobility, including his father as well as Nicolaes Everaerts, Nicolaes Perrenot, and Frans Craneveld. See Korneel Goossens, ‘Janus Secundus als medailleur’, Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 4 (1970), 28–84; and David Price, Janus Secundus (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996), p. 21. 44 Duverger, ‘Vorstellingen’, p. 106. 41

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Nicolaus Grudius’s 252-line poem, Carmen Sepulchrale, was published in Leuven upon the translation of Margaret’s body from Bruges to Brou in 1532 and was accompanied by additional poems by Secundus and Frans Craneveld.45 Grudius’s work was funded by Antoine de Lalaing (Count of Hoogstraten and Acting Governor of the Netherlands upon Margaret’s death), who was in charge of the translation ceremonies after the completion of Margaret’s tomb in Brou.46 Tied to Margaret’s funerary rituals, these texts were disseminated among important civic centres of the Low Countries, including Antwerp and Leuven. Privileges, reprints, and reissues, moreover, indicate the popularity of these literary enterprises. In addition to these publications, two further etchings are related to Hogenberg’s series. An unsigned etching in the British Museum in London (Figure 7, upper portion) depicts Margaret of Austria in prayer with her patron saint and a scene of almsgiving in the background, all surrounded by an ornate antique architectural frame. Popham attributed the design of the print to Bernard van Orley on account of the ornamental style, and Hogenberg has been suggested as the etcher of the composition.47 A second print (Figure 7, lower portion), unsigned but also attributed to Hogenberg, reproduces Secundus’s epitaph to Margaret (Funerals 5, from the third print in the series) inside a text box surrounded by a cartouche with the year 1531 and the Regent’s coat of arms.48 Hogenberg’s prints, alongside Secundus’s funerary poems, thus represent a broader literary and visual representation of Margaret’s death. Members of Margaret’s court commissioned these literary projects, including Secundus’s poems and Grudius’s dedicatory account. Printed images — including Hogenberg’s series, the unsigned print in the British Museum, and Hogenberg’s independent text print — operated in a similar way: arising in a courtly context, they soon circulated among civic audiences. Prints such as Hogenberg’s series actively shaped civic interest in the ruling nobility, and allowed a closer degree of civic participation in important historical events, like the death of a ruler. They served as an index of political and artistic concerns alike. References to earlier traditions of northern printmaking, including engravings by Schongauer and Dürer, would likely have been noted and appreciated by an audience of burgeoning print collectors. The stylistic language of the last two prints of the series, moreover, contributed to contemporary interest in the antique mode in civic centres and among collectors who would never commission such monuments for themselves. A consideration of the etching technique can shed further light on possible viewership of Hogenberg’s print series. Emperor Maximilian I’s large-scale print projects in the first quarter of the sixteenth century in Augsburg played an important role in establishing the woodcut medium within a courtly context. Margaret of Austria had an active role in Maximilian I’s print projects: a luxury version of the Triumphal Arch, printed on parchment, was sent to Mechelen for her close assessment and feedback in 1518.49 She also Dekker, Janus Secundus, p. 273. Based on an extant letter, dated 1532, from Grudius to Secundus. See Dekker, Janus Secundus, p. 167. Popham, ‘Etchings’, p. 287; and Duverger, ‘Vorstellingen’, p. 107. I believe that someone other than Hogenberg etched the print in the British Museum, due to different technical handling. 48 The prints exist in unicum in the British Museum, London, where they are mounted together. Dekker suggested that Secundus’s Funerals 4 (from the fourth print in the series) was likewise reproduced in an etching that no longer survives. See Dekker, Janus Secundus, p. 273. 49 Eichberger, ‘Illustrierte Festzüge für das Haus Habsburg-Burgund: Idee und Wirklichkeit’, in Hofkultur in Frankreich und Europa im Spätmittelalter, ed. by C. Freigang and J. Schmitt (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005), pp. 73–98 (p. 94). 45 46 47

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Fig. 7: Nicolas Hogenberg (?), Margaret of Austria with St. Margaret, and Jan Secundus’s Epitaph for Margaret of Austria 1531, etching, 33.6 × 26.6 cm. © Trustees of the British Museum. ­Registration number: II,5.151

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owned a copy of the Triumphal Procession, which remained disassembled and stored in her library, and she commissioned large-scale political print projects herself: on the occasion of Charles V’s coronation in Bologna in 1530, she ordered from the Antwerp printmaker Robert Peril a five metre-long frieze of the procession, which consists of twenty-four woodcuts. Following this tradition of large-scale print projects, Charles V commissioned a Hapsburg family tree from Peril in 1535, which consists of twenty-one woodcuts and measures seven meters high. These series were printed in limited quantities, often on parchment and hand coloured to recall illuminated manuscripts, or devised in grand scale to echo monumental wall decorations.50 We can thus surmise that at the behest of rulers and in the hands of court artists, woodcut projects in Germany and throughout the Holy Roman Empire were made to resemble more luxurious arts to broadcast their patron’s importance. Alongside Maximilian’s woodcut projects, a decidedly more local phenomenon was taking shape in the Low Countries during the 1520s. Netherlandish printmakers including Lucas van Leyden, Jan Gossart, and Hogenberg began producing etchings of courtly subjects including portraits and historical events. Lucas van Leyden’s portrait of Maximilian I (1520) and Jan Gossart’s portrait of Charles V (1520) are the earliest known examples of etching in the Netherlands. Around 1530, Hogenberg etched a series showing the entry of Charles  V into Bologna (measuring more than eight metres) as well as the death of Margaret of Austria series.51 These Netherlandish examples, while few in number, represent the translation of German imperial woodcuts into the medium of etching and can be related to the broader Netherlandish interest in this technique at the time: small-scale etchings of religious and mythological subjects, more akin to German developments in the medium, were produced by Frans Crabbe and Hogenberg in Mechelen; Dirck Vellert in Antwerp; and Lucas van Leyden in Leiden. Courtly and civic engagement with etching seems to have arisen concurrently, around 1520–22; no clear precedent can be established. What follows, then, is a parallel interest in the etching medium, fostered by the circulation of etchings between both social realms. The differing viewing publics would have recognized or appreciated different facets of such prints: political, devotional, technical, and artistic elements, among others. We can, therefore, consider Hogenberg’s print series as a type of paper monument in dialogue with Margaret’s grand sculptural and architectural commissions. Bepler demonstrates that such projects served to preserve the memory of the deceased, functioning in a different way from actual tombs or epitaphs.52 The nature of the printed medium — with its relatively low cost, multiple impressions, and portability — gave access to a greatly expanded public. Hogenberg’s paper monuments thus stood between ephemeral rituals of mourning and monumental tombs and structures, mediating between city and court. Silver and Wyckoff, ‘Introduction: Size Does Matter’, in Grand Scale, ed. by Silver and Wyckoff, pp. 8–13 (p. 9). Eichberger, ‘Illustrierte Festzüge’, p. 84. Ad Stijnman has noted that the vast amount of nitric acid needed to produce the lengthy frieze is a good indicator of a courtly commission, as is the privilegio cited in one of the prints. See Stijnman, Engraving and Etching 1400–2000: A  History of the Development of Manual Intaglio Printmaking Processes (Houten: Hes & De Graaf, 2012), p.  71 n.  259. On Hogenberg’s Charles  V frieze, see Von Heusinger, ‘Einige Bemerkungen zur Editionsgeschichte des Triumphzugs Kaiser Karls V. und Papst Clemens VII nach der Kaiserkrönung am 24. Februar 1530 in Bologna von Nicolas Hogenberg mit einem Anhang: Der Holzschnittfries von Robert Peril’, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museuen, 43 (2001), 63–108. 52 Bepler, ‘Women’, p. 395. 50 51

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These paper monuments allowed individuals to behold and possess the fictionalized representation of Margaret’s death and commemoration, yet they also offered an important and telling representation of the Regent. The circulation and examination of the print series could be seen as an extension of the death ritual, which functioned alongside the tombs to re-establish social harmony after a ruler’s death by monumentalizing his or her social and political body. Hogenberg’s print series thus commemorated Margaret’s death through Marian imagery to both her noble followers and to a burgeoning elite public of collectors. Just as Margaret’s body was literally and symbolically divided across her dominion — in Savoy, Bruges, and Mechelen — so, too, the prints of the death of the Regent circulated her ritual body to a still broader realm.

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Batavia, the New World, and the Origins of Humankind in Jan Mostaert’s Eve and Four Children Marisa Anne Bass Yale University

Among the fantastical frozen creations that populated Brussels during the city’s 1511 winter festival were two ice sculptures of Adam and Eve.1 The poet Jan Smeken, who immortalized the festival’s monumental snowmen in verse, emphasizes that the first father and mother were portrayed ‘nacht ende dach naect’ (‘naked both night and day’).2 Nor was the couple alone in appearing scantily clad and on public view. The mischievous god Cupid, a muscular Hercules, and a bathing Bathsheba spied upon by King David were all in the vicinity, crafted artfully out of the material that the Low Countries possessed most in abundance: water.3 The Brussels snowmen, born from the frozen Netherlandish landscape, are testament to a strong visual engagement with the nude body that was decidedly local.4 It is striking that Smeken does not dwell on Adam and Eve’s corporeal shame — an interpretation too often ascribed to the northern nude — but instead playfully remarks on their nakedness; in the poet’s words, the two lovers are not sinful but ‘suver ende reyn, als suster ende broedere’ (‘chaste and pure, like brother and sister’).5 Uncivilized yet noble, their bodies represent a time when mankind was not yet encumbered with the burden of social consciousness. By contrast, the spectators of the winter festival knowingly encountered the figures of Adam and Eve in the postlapsarian present. The momentary collapse of time between the audience, the first couple, and the other Old Testament characters and classical deities on display was the source of the festival’s entertainment value, but it was also more than that. The commingling of biblical and ancient narratives was foundational to the larger I am most grateful to Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene for the invitation to participate in the ‘Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century’ conference in October 2012. I thank them and the volume’s anonymous readers for their helpful comments on this essay. All translations are my own. 2 Jan Smeken, D’wonder dat in die stat van Bruesel ghemaect was van claren ijse en snee, die wel gheraect was, in Herman Pleij, De sneeuwpoppen van 1511. Literatuur en stadscultuur tussen middeleeuwen en moderne tijd (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1988), p. 358, lines 37–40: ‘Aen der Cappellen stonden twee ghelieven, | Suver ende reyn, als suster ende broedere, | Nacht ende dach naect, als Adam met Ieven, | Ons eerste vadere ende eerste moedere’. 3 Smeken, D’wonder, pp.  258, lines 49–52 (Cupid), 259–60, lines 85–94 (David and Bathsheba), 361, lines 125–36 (Hercules). 4 Pleij, De sneeuwpoppen, pp. 88–109, 259–73. 5 The canonical statement on the disturbing corporeality of northern nudes is Kenneth Clark’s chapter ‘The Alternative Convention’, in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956; repr. 1990), pp. 308–47. See also Eric Jan Sluijter, ‘The Nude, the Artist, and the Model: The Case of Rembrandt’, in The Nude and the Norm in the Early Modern Low Countries, ed. by Karolien de Clippel, Katharina van Cauteren, and Katlijne van der Stighelen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 11–34 (esp. pp. 16–18); and Marisa Bass, ‘The Nude and the Norm in the Early Modern Low Countries, Karolien de Clippel et al.’, in CAA Reviews (October 2012) http://dx.doi.org/10.3202/caa.reviews.2012.115 [accessed 6 November, 2016]. 1

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 209-228. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114009

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sixteenth-century imagining of the past. From noble genealogies to city legends, history in the early modern Netherlands was invariably interwoven with myth and tailored to complement the venerable lineages to which its individuals and communities aspired.6 Michel de Certeau has called this approach to constructing the past ‘the writing of history’, but the experience of the Brussels winter festival — with its many incongruous figures interacting on a shared urban stage — would have constituted something very different from the reading of Smeken’s verses.7 The viewer standing amongst the monumental bodies of these snowmen not only engaged simultaneously with characters from disparate narratives but was also faced with the fragility of historical images themselves. Soon Adam and Eve would melt back into the past, regressing from solid to liquid form in a demonstration of their material and corporeal ephemerality. This essay explores a phenomenon that might best be described as ‘the imaging of history’ and that applies well to the snowmen of the Brussels festival. In using this term, I draw on Henri van de Waal’s magisterial study of historical works that were produced in the Low Countries from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries.8 Van der Waal employs this notion, which he calls geschied-uitbeelding, to account for images that interweave different strands of history, iconography, knowledge, time, and place within a dense visual field. The construction and potential resonances of such images, he argues, matter even more than their explicit subject. One example that Van de Waal discusses at length is a woodcut from the title-page of Gerard Geldenhouwer’s 1530 History of Batavia that depicts Adam, Eve, and their children in a lush forest setting (Figure  1).9 Gerard Geldenhouwer (1482–1542) was a Netherlandish humanist who contributed, along with Erasmus and other local scholars in the early sixteenth century, to a burgeoning interest in the Batavians; as the ancient inhabitants of the Low Countries, the Batavians were renowned — according to Tacitus and other Roman authors — for their strength and martial bravery.10 Geldenhouwer was the first to

For a useful overview on issues of identity formation in the early modern Netherlands, see Robert Stein, ‘Introduction’, in Networks, Regions, and Nations: Shaping Identities in the Low Countries, 1300–1650, ed. by Stein and Judith Pollmann (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 1–18. 7 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. by Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 8 Henri van de Waal, Drie eeuwen vaderlandsche geschied-uitbeelding, 1400–1800: Een iconologische studie, 2 vols (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952). 9 Gerard Geldenhouwer, Historia Batavica (Argentorati: Christian Egenolff, 1530), fol.  1r. On the use of this print for Geldenhouwer’s title-page, see Van de Waal, Drie eeuwen, i, pp.  157–63; Peter van der Coelen, ‘De Bataven in de beeldende kunst’, in De Bataven: Verhalen van een verdwenen volk (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 2004), pp. 144–87, 323–26 (esp. pp. 145–46 for Geldenhouwer’s History of Batavia); Aart Noordzij, Gelre: Dynastie, land en identiteit in de late middeleeuwen (Hilversum: Verloren, 2009), p. 299, Figure 22; and Bass, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 97–98. 10 For Erasmus’s 1508 adage on the ‘Batavian ear’, one of the first texts to foment interest in the Batavians, see Desiderius Erasmus, Erasmi Roterodami adagiorum chiliades tres, ac centuriae fere totidem (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1508), fols 249r–v; Erasumus, Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, 9  vols (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1993–), ii.viii, no.  3535; and for an English translation see Erasmus, Adages, in Collected Works of Erasmus, trans. by John N. Grant and Betty I. Knott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–), xxxvi, pp. 235–37, iv.vi 35. For further background, see M. E. H. N. Mout, ‘“Het Bataafse oor”: De lotgevallen van Erasmus’ adagium “Auris Batava” in de Nederlandse geschiedschrijving’, Mededelingen der Koninklijk Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen 56  (1993), 77–102; E.  O.  G. Haitsma Mulier, ‘De Bataafse mythe opnieuw bekeken’, Bijdragen en mededelingen voor de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 3 (1996), 344–67; and I. Schöffer, ‘The Batavian Myth during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Britain and the Netherlands: Volume V, Some Political Mythologies: Papers Delivered to the Fifth Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference, ed. by J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 78–101. 6

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Fig. 1: The First Family, from Gerard Geldenhouwer, Historia Batavica (Argentorati: Christian Egenolff, 1530). University of Amsterdam, O 60-348, fol. 1r.

publish a treatise exclusively devoted to this topic.11 Van de Waal convincing shows that the First Family woodcut was not created for Geldenhouwer’s treatise but was a pre-existing image co-opted by the publisher out of practicality. It was much easier to reuse a print than to commission a new one specifically intended to represent the ancient Batavians, whose features Roman writers had outlined only vaguely.12 Geldenhouwer, Lucubratiuncula de Batavorum insula (Antwerp: Michael Hillen, 1520). See also Geldenhouwer, Gerard Geldenhouwer van Nijmegen (1482–1542): Historische werken: Lucubratiuncula de Batavorum insula, Historia Batavica, Germaniae inferioris historiae, Germanicorum historiarum illustratio, ed. and trans. by István Bejczy and others (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998), pp. 34–48. 12 Only in the later sixteenth century did Netherlandish artists begin to produce images of the Batavians based specifically on the descriptions in classical sources. See Van der Coelen, ‘De Bataven’, pp. 144–87, 323–26. 11

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Yet even if the First Family was not produced as a depiction of the ancient tribe whom Geldenhouwer takes as his subject, the choice of this particular woodcut rests on the foundations of strong creative association. Geldenhouwer and his colleagues wishfully described their Batavian forebears as not only beautiful but also impressive for their natural vigour and affinity with the fertile lands they inhabited.13 Adam, virile in his animal pelt, Eve, with her hair tied up prettily in classical fashion, and their throng of happy children in the wilderness comport themselves in a manner that could just as easily be equated with the simple life of the ancient Batavians as with the postlapsarian domesticity of the First Family. Without an existing repertoire of Batavian iconography from which to draw, the appropriation of Adam and Eve as representatives of a distant primitive people was a logical and evocative choice. As I will endeavour to show, the First Family woodcut from Geldenhouwer’s titlepage is among a handful of images representing the narrative of mankind’s origins that had precisely this polyvalence in the context of the early sixteenth-century Low Countries. Particularly at the Netherlandish court, where members of the nobility were cultivating a burgeoning interest both in the ‘discovery’ of the New World and in the newly rediscovered Batavians, artists responded by producing works that melded emerging fields of historical and ethnographic knowledge with established biblical and mythological narratives. The growing fascination with distant continents and ancient tribal ancestry lent itself to exploration in pictures. A still little-known painting entitled Eve and Four Children by the artist Jan Mostaert (c. 1474–1552/53), dating to around 1520, offers a case study — one even more complex than that of Geldenhouwer’s title-page — in how the evolving conception of the Netherlandish past shaped the image of the First Family (Figure  2).14 Mostaert’s painting renders strange a familiar Old Testament story and, in doing so, performs an ‘imaging of history’ especially tailored to his contemporary audience. Adam’s Absence In the eerie gloaming of the day or perhaps the first light of dawn, Mostaert’s Eve sits with four children at the entrance to the darkened mouth of a cave. In the offing, beyond the gate and the canal that divides the family’s makeshift home from the wilderness, the sun glows pale over a verdant field. Eve dominates the composition, her body monumental Cornelius Aurelius, De Cronycke van Hollandt, Zeelandt ende Vrieslant beghinnende van Adams tiden tot die geboerte Ons Heren Jhesum, voertgaende tot den jare M.CCCCC ende XVII (Leiden: Jan Seversz, 1517), fols 11r–18v; Geldenhouwer, Lucubratiuncula, fols A3v–A4r; Geldenhouwer, Historische werken, pp. 42–45. 14 Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, tempera possibly with some oil on panel, 36.8 × 28.3 cm, inv. no. 1955.946. For past literature, see François-Xavier de Burtin, Traité théorique et pratique des connoissances qui sont nécessaires à tout amateur de tableaux (Brussels: L’Imprimerie de Weissenbruch, 1808), p. 196, no. 55 (as a work by Jan van Eyck); Kurt Steinbart, ‘Jan Mostaerts “Erste Familie”’, Pantheon 16 (1935), 378–79; Godefridus Joannes Hoogewerff, De Noord-Nederlandsche Schilderkunst, 5 vols (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1936–47), ii (1937), pp. 461–62, Figure 227; Max. J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, 15 vols (Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1967–76), x, p. 86, no. 157; Philip R. Berk, ‘Et Adam dilexit Abel: Jan Mostaert’s First Family’, Oud Holland 96 (1982), 201–12; James Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, the Graphic Arts from 1350 to 1575, rev. by Larry Silver and Henry Luttikhuizen (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Inc., 2005), pp. 418–20, Figure 17.10; John F. Moffitt, ‘“Een West-Indien landtschap met vreemt ghebouw”: Jan Mostaert on the Architectural Primitivism Characterizing a “Golden Age” Reborn in the New World’, in Art and the Native American: Perceptions, Realities, Influences, ed. by Mary Louise Krumrine and Susan C. Scott (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2001), pp. 102–45 (pp. 103–04, Figure 3.2); and Michelle Moseley-Christian, ‘From Page to Print: The Transformation of the “Wild Woman” in Early Modern Northern Engravings’, Word & Image 27.4 (2011), 429–42 (pp. 437–38, Figure 8). 13

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Fig. 2: Jan Mostaert, Eve and Four Children, c. 1520. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, inv. no. 1955.946.

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compared to everything around her. She nurses her infant in a humble posture that immediately recalls the Virgin nursing the Christ Child, particularly the image of Mary resting on the flight into Egypt.15 Mostaert may even have modelled her face and the delicate tilt of her head on the Virgins of his contemporary Bernard van Orley, to whom this Eve bears resemblance.16 Along the same lines, the central child, wearing an animal skin and gingerly holding his younger sibling, recalls the pairing of the infant John the Baptist and Jesus playing at the Virgin’s side. Yet despite these affinities, Eve’s fur robe does little to conceal her soft form, and her exposed breasts and slightly parted legs clearly set her apart from the Virgin Mary. Mostaert’s Eve is alluring and sensual, all the more so in the context of the strange world she inhabits. Provocative details stand out in the otherwise sparse surrounds. An apple in the foreground immediately calls to mind Adam and Eve’s fall from paradise. A pile of sticks and chopped kindling at the cave’s mouth is an index of postlapsarian labour that could also provoke thought of the Cross and of mankind’s redemption from sin.17 The cave itself, with its small fire burning inside, might allude simultaneously to Mary’s womb and to Christ’s tomb, the bookends to the latter’s mortal history. Again, however, these typological allusions do not diminish the primitive otherness of the family’s remote abode: the sensual darkness of the cave; the shadow Eve casts against its rocky façade; the restive quiet of the wilderness where the potential for violence is always lurking. The painting’s upper register exposes this latent threat and the ramifications of Adam and Eve’s sin through the fatal contest between Cain and Abel. Abel offers his sacrifice atop the cliff ’s ledge, praying humbly before a fire that emits only the lightest smoke. Cain’s fire, by contrast, burns red and black as soot. Cain arches his back and casts his eyes towards the heavens without any gesture of prayer, a posture that echoes the form of the dead tree trunk hanging ominously over the cliff beside him. To the far left, their fraternal conflict plays out in Cain brutally clubbing Abel to death with the animal jawbone in his upraised hand. Adam, Eve, and their children were repeatedly cast as the typological precursors to the Virgin Mary and Christ in devotional images. The couple boldly entered the history of early Netherlandish panel painting from the side wings of The Ghent Altarpiece, in which Cain and Abel appear in illusory sculpted lunettes above the heads of their parents, and Adam and Eve themselves face inwards toward the central triumvirate of John the Baptist, the Virgin Mary, and God the Father. Yet Mostaert’s representation of the First Family as Several paintings of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt by Mostaert’s contemporary Joachim Patinir provide a close comparison. Patinir often places the Virgin and Child in the foreground of wild landscapes replete with small background figures and narrative details designed to provoke prolonged contemplation. See. in particular. Patinir’s Landscape with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, c. 1518–20, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, inv. no. P 1611, as in Alejandro Vergara and others, Patinir: Essays and Critical Catalogue (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007), pp. 182–93, no. 5. For further discussion, see Reindert L. Falkenburg, Landscape as an Image of the Pilgrimage of Life, trans. by Michael Hoyle (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Pub. Co., 1988). 16 See, for example, the representation of the Virgin Mary in Bernard van Orley, The Holy Family, 1522, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, inv. no. P 2692; Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, viii, p. 110, no. 140, Pl. 119. The comparison to Van Orley was first suggested by Steinbart, ‘Jan Mostaerts’, p. 379. 17 This association surfaces even more assertively in an engraving after Francesco Salviati’s design (c. 1530–60), Adam and Eve with the Infant Abel, which situates the couple under a large broken tree branch that forms a cross directly above the head of Eve. A palm tree in the background of the composition further ties the scene to the narrative of the Virgin Mary and Joseph resting on the flight into Egypt. See Francesco Salviati, 1510–1563: O, La bella maniera, ed. by Catherine Monbeig Goguel (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1998), p. 67, Figure 2; and Luisa Mortari, Francesco Salviati (Rome: Leonardo De Luca, 1992), p. 300, no. 25. 15

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an independent narrative subject has no obvious precedent in panel painting from the Low Countries. Instead, the painting finds its lineage in the Speculum Humanae Salvationis, a popular medieval theological text that links Old and New Testament history. In the Speculum tradition, Adam and Eve are depicted preoccupied with their postlapsarian labours and, quite often, accompanied by the infants Cain and Abel.18 This iconography migrated from manuscript to print at the end of the fifteenth century: a woodcut illustration in the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle and a series of engravings representing the First Family by the Italian artist Cristofano Robetta, which riff on the compositions of Albrecht Dürer’s early prints, offer prominent examples.19 Around the same time, there surfaced a handful of illuminated and printed images representing families of wild men as idyllic primitives, which borrow from the iconography of the First Family in showing a nude couple living in peaceful harmony with nature; the addition of conspicuous body hair is often all that sets these wild figures apart from Adam and Eve.20 As such, it is not surprising that Mostaert found inspiration for his First Family in an illustration from Thielman Kerver’s printed Book of Hours, which also belongs to this visual tradition (Figure 3).21 First published in 1519 and repeated in several subsequent editions, the woodcut looks back to the images found in the Speculum Humanae Salvationis, but is notably divided into two distinct horizontal planes comparable to those in Mostaert’s composition. The lower register pictures Eve nursing and Adam weaving a basket while the young Cain and Abel cavort between them. In the upper register, as in Mostaert’s painting, the two brothers are depicted in fatal combat. The popularity of Kerver’s composition in the Low Countries is attested by its direct iteration in an illuminated Netherlandish Book of Hours dating to 1535 (Figure 4).22 Yet this source also raises a very pressing question: Where in Mostaert’s Eve and Four Children is the figure of Adam? See, for instance, British Museum, London, 1485–1509, Harvey 2838, fol.  5r; and Berk, ‘Et Adam dilexit Abel’, pp. 204–05. 19 Mark J. Zucker, The Illustrated Bartsch (New York: Abaris Books, 1984), xxv, pp. 531–36, nos 004, 008, and 009. See also Giulia Bartrum and others, Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 244, no. 196; and Stephanie Moser, Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 40–43. 20 On these positive images of wild men, see Moseley-Christian, ‘From Page to Print’, pp. 432–38; Lynn Frier Kaufmann, The Noble Savage: Satyrs and Satyr Families in Renaissance Art (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), pp. 35–41; and Moser, Ancestral Images, pp. 48–59. A particularly notable example is the miniature Wildman, or the State of Nature by Jean Bourdichon from the series Four Conditions of Society, c. 1500 (Paris, École des Beaux-Arts, Inv. E.B.A. no. MS 90), for which see also Emmanuelle Brugerolles and David Guillet, The Renaissance in France: Drawings from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (Paris: École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1994), pp. 16–19, no. 6; and Timothy Husband, The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980), pp. 128–31 no. 32. 21 For Kerver’s Book of Hours, see Stundenbuchdrucke der Sammlung Bibermühle, 1490–1550, ed. by Heribert Tenschert and Ina Nettekoven, 3  vols (Bibermühle: Heribert Tenschert, 2003), iii, pp.  968–76, cat. no.  117 (use of Rome, printed in Paris by Thieleman Kerver, 5 December 1519). For subsequent editions published by Kerver in which the same Adam and Eve is reused, see Tenschert and Nettekoven, iii, pp. 977–1003, cat. nos 118–20; and Tenschert and Nettekoven, iii, pp.  1008–1116, cat. no.  121a. As Tenschert and Nettekoven point out (p.  965), the visual program of the Office of the Dead — the section in which the Adam and Eve woodcut appears (fol. K2v in the 1519 edition) — is particularly elaborate in Kerver’s Book of Hours and also includes an Expulsion from Paradise based on Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut from the Small Passion. Perhaps this expanded visual cycle is what appealed to Mostaert, although it is notable that other early sixteenthcentury northern artists, among them Hans Holbein the Younger and Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, also seem to have drawn inspiration from printed Books of Hours. See Stephanie Buck, ‘The Images of Death and the Triumph of Life’, in Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515–1532 (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2006), pp. 117–23 (pp. 120–21); and Ilja M. Veldman, ‘Doen Pietersz’s Editions of Woodcuts by Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen and Lucas van Leyden and Illustrations in French Printed Books of Hours’, Simiolus 35 (2011), 40–60. 22 Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag, MS 74 G 9, fol. 74v. 18

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Fig. 3: Adam and Eve with Cain and Abel, from Hore deipare virginis Marie secundum usum Romanum, use of Rome, published by Thielman Kerver, 1519. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, PML 127772, fol. K2v.

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Fig. 4: Adam and Eve with Cain and Abel, from Book of Hours, use of Tournai, 1535. Royal Library The Hague, MS 74 G 9, fol. 74v.

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In the only extended study ever devoted to Mostaert’s painting, Philip Berk argues that the large child on the right must in fact be Adam reaching down towards his sons Cain and Abel at the composition’s centre.23 Berk contends, with reference to exegetical sources, that the reaching gesture on the part of this putative Adam symbolizes his paternal preference for Abel and his simultaneous denial of the older Cain. However, to explain Adam into the picture in this manner is simply not convincing on a visual level. All the figures in the foreground register as children, and Adam seems truly nowhere among them. In a closely contemporary print by Dirck Vellert (1522), a wild and almost naked Eve sits in the foreground with a child (presumably Cain, given the sinful implications of his gesture towards the apple) while a diminutive Adam is relegated, almost comically, to tilling the earth in the background (Figure  5).24 Another rather awkward Netherlandish painting from the period, recently attributed to Mostaert and now in a private collection, follows the same schema, with Adam hard at work in the middle ground and a voluptuous Eve nursing in the foreground amid an even larger throng of children (Figure 6).25 This panel painting, which is over twice as large as Mostaert’s Eve and Four Children, also includes background scenes of Cain and Abel and is close enough in conception to the latter that a connection between them seems plausible. Early literature on Mostaert’s painting likewise identified a shadowy smudge in the background landscape as Adam ploughing the fields, but today that identification is impossible to verify.26 Regardless, in all these works, the emphasis is really on Eve as the precursor to the Virgin Mary, while Adam’s role is much less significant. To understand Mostaert’s absenting of Adam from centre stage, it is necessary to delve deeper into the work’s likely function and reception within the artist’s milieu. Mostaert and the Netherlandish Court Mostaert’s painting is dense in narrative for its small scale. The work compares closely in size to Netherlandish devotional diptychs, which were designed for easy portability and repeated contemplation. Mostaert did produce at least one such devotional picture representing Christ’s appearance to his mother in Limbo and his liberation of Adam, Eve, and other preChristian figures.27 This subject is highly unusual for the diptych genre but comparable to Eve and Four Children in its concern with continuity between the Old and New Testaments. However, there is no technical evidence to suggest that Mostaert’s Eve and Four Children once formed a pair, and it holds integrity and interest as an independent composition.

Berk, Et Adam dilexit Abel, pp. 201–12. F.  W.  H. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts, ca. 1450–1700, 72  vols (Amsterdam: Roosendaal & Rotterdam, 1949–2010), xxxiii, p. 188, no. 1 (5.6 × 4.1 cm, etching and engraving, signed and dated: 1522 D*V ĀGT 19). 25 See Jan van der Stock and others, In Search of Utopia: Art and Science in the Era of Thomas More (Leuven: Davidfonds, 2016), pp. 320-23, no. 57, with prior literature (with a false monogram of Albrecht Dürer, 97.2 × 68 cm). 26 Both Burtin, Traité théorique, p. 196 and Steinbart, ‘Jan Mostaerts’, p. 379 claimed to see the figure of Adam ploughing in the background. Subsequent conservation photos that I attained through the kind help of Teresa O’Toole at the Clark Institute reveal a loss to the original paint surface in that area, which in-painting has rendered obscure. The conservation was done sometime around 1957 when the painting was transferred to its present panel. 27 Christ Appearing to his Mother in Limbo and a Kneeling Female Donor with the Redeemed from the Old Testament, divided between the Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede, inv. no. 13, and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, inv. no. 1930.76, both panels 26.7 × 18.8 cm. See John Oliver Hand and others, Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 192–99, 293, 320, no. 28. 23 24

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Fig. 5: Dirck Vellert, Eve and Cain, 1522, etching and engraving. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, inv. no. RP-P-1908-3647X.

In fact, the format and pictorial strategies of Mostaert’s work bear close comparison to the small mythological paintings of his artistic contemporary Jan Gossart (c. 1478– 1532). During precisely the same years to which Mostaert’s painting dates, Gossart innovated in appropriating the intimacy of the personal devotional image, with which his local patrons were already so familiar, for the creation of scenes of classical lovers entwined 219

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Fig. 6: Jan Mostaert (?), Adam and Eve with their Family, c. 1525. Private collection.

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Fig. 7: Jan Gossart, Hermaphrodite and Salmacis, 1521. Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, inv. no. 2451.

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in titillating and evocative poses. Gossart’s Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (c.  1517), for instance, depicts Salmacis’s lustful but thwarted embrace of Hermaphroditus on a panel almost identical in size to that of Mostaert’s painting (Figure 7).28 The scale of Gossart’s picture invites close study of the naked struggle in the foreground, complete with its clever figural allusion to an ancient Apollo sculpture that Gossart had drawn in Rome; no less intriguing is the background detail of the gods answering Salmacis’s plea for perpetual union and transforming the pair into a single hermaphroditic body, a metamorphosis that — as the pathetic tree stump beside them suggests — leads to a loss of reproductive potency.29 Mostaert’s Eve and Four Children shares with Gossart’s Hermaphroditus and Salmacis a focus on the human body as an acting agent within the untamed landscape, which is emphasized in both pictures by the rocky scenographic backdrop. Both artists portray the natural world as an arena to which their figural subjects were inextricably connected and as a site where narratives of mortal culpability and divine intervention play out in turn. According to Karel van Mander’s effusive biography of Mostaert, first published in 1604, the artist was indeed acquainted with Gossart.30 Van Mander writes that Gossart approached his colleague for assistance with his most famous and monumental painting — the now lost Middelburg Altarpiece — but that Mostaert refused because he was much too busy with courtly requests from a certain high-ranking female aristocrat.31 The Regent of the Netherlands, Margaret of Austria (1480–1530) is likely the aristocrat to whom Van Mander refers. Margaret, who employed Gossart in various capacities and owned his Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, also named Mostaert painctre aux honneurs (‘painter with honours’) on 14 March 1518 and received a New Year’s gift from the artist in 1521: a portrait of her deceased husband Philibert of Savoy.32 Although the original owner of Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 32.8 × 21.5 cm, inv. no. 2451. See Bass, Jan Gossart, p. 109; and Maryan W. Ainsworth and others, Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance: The Complete Works (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010), pp. 224–26, no. 32, with prior literature. Other small mythological pictures by Gossart that survive today are the Hercules and Deianira (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, 36.8 × 26.8 cm, inv. no. 46.10), the Venus and Cupid (Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 32 × 24 cm, inv. no. 6611), and Venus (Pinacoteca dell’Accademia dei Concordi, Rovigo, 59 × 29.9 cm, inv. no. 79). See Ainsworth, Man, Myth, pp. 221–24, no. 31; pp. 226–29, no. 33; and pp. 229–32, no. 34. For further discussion of the function and polyvalence of Gossart’s small mythological paintings, see Bass, Jan Gossart, pp. 75–113. 29 For Gossart’s drawing of the Apollo, see Ainsworth, Man, Myth, pp. 226, 378–80 no. 99. 30 Karel van Mander took a particular interest in Mostaert as one of his artistic precursors in Haarlem and was generally quite well informed about his life and works, even if he exaggerated Mostaert’s noble standing. See Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, ed. and trans. by Hessel Miedema, 6 vols (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1995), i, pp. 174–77, fols 229r–v. For commentary, see also Van Mander, The Lives, iii, pp. 190–204; and Truus van Bueren, ‘“De beste Schilders van het gantsche Nederlandt.” Karel van Mander en het Haarlemse cultuurbeleid 1603–1606’, Oud Holland 105 (1991), 291–305. For Mostaert’s biography and relevant archival documents, see Sander Pierron, Les Mostaert: Jean Mostaert, dit le maître d’Oultremont, Gilles et Francois Mostaert, Michel Mostaert (Brussels: G. van Oest, 1912), pp. 1–27; M. Thierry de Bye Dólleman, ‘Jan Jansz. Mostaert, schilder, een beroemd Haarlemmer (c. 1473 –c. 1555)’, Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 17 (1963), 123–36; James Snyder, ‘The Early Haarlem School of Painting. Part III. The Problem of Geertgen tot Sint Jans and Jan Mostaert’, Art Bulletin 53 (1971), 444–58 (pp. 447–51); and J. Duverger, ‘Jan Mostaert, ereschilder van Margareta van Oostenrijk’, Aachner Kunstblätter 41 (1971), 113–17. 31 Van Mander, The Lives, i, p. 176, fol. 229v: ‘Daer wort oock vertelt dat Ian Mabuse zijn hulp te hebben versocht in t’werck van d’Abdie te Middelborgh, dan Mostart sulcx affloegh om dat hy was in dienst van soo grooten Vrouw oft Princes van de welcke noch by zijn geslacht is seker geschrift datse Mostart bekende haer Edelman te wesen’. 32 Although Mostaert’s career seems to have been based primarily in Haarlem, no document places him in his hometown between the years 1516 and 1526. In addition to bestowing his honorary title, Margaret also presented Mostaert with a payment in thanks for his New Year’s gift. See Duverger, ‘Jan Mostaert’, pp. 113–17. It has also been suggested that Mostaert’s aforementioned diptych depicting Christ in Limbo was made for Margaret, given the likely identification of the female donor in the right panel with the Regent’s mother Mary of Burgundy. See Hand and others, Prayers and Portraits, pp. 192–98; and Larry Silver, ‘Old-Time Religion: Bernart van Orley and the Devotional Tradition’, Pantheon 56 (1998), 75–84 (pp. 78–79). Meanwhile, Margaret employed Gossart to restore several older paintings in her collection and owned a handful of other paintings by his hand that appear in her 1523/4 inventory. See Sytske Weidema and Anna Koopstra, Jan Gossart: The Documentary Evidence (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 30–32, nos 22–23. 28

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­Mostaert’s Eve and Four Children is unknown, it may have functioned in a manner similar to Gossart’s mythological image, which Margaret of Austria kept in her personal study alongside other small and precious collectibles, including a pair of statuettes described as ‘deux personnaiges de Adam et Eve nuz, de leton dorez, bien faiz’ (‘two figures of Adam and Eve in the nude, of gilt metal, and well crafted’) listed in the inventory directly following the entry on Gossart’s picture.33 The context and reception of Gossart’s Hermaphroditus and Salmacis suggests that Mostaert’s closely comparable picture may too have provoked reflection not just as a devotional image but also as an object of curiosity and sensual appeal. Gossart’s exploration of mythological subjects was inflected by an interest in reviving the ancient historical foundations of the Low Countries, a pursuit in which Margaret of Austria and her fellow members of the Netherlandish nobility invested actively through relationships with humanist historiographers and engagement with local archaeological discoveries.34 Among the most avid antiquarians in this circle was Gossart’s primary patron Philip of Burgundy (1464–1524), from whom Margaret had received the Hermaphroditus and Salmacis as a gift, complete with a faux marble frame that endowed the painting with the aura of an antique object.35 The Batavian historian Gerard Geldenhouwer, whom Philip of Burgundy employed as secretary at his court, praised his patron’s interest in all manner of ancient learning; Geldenhouwer also documents that Philip personally supervised the public display of an ancient inscription discovered on the shores of Zeeland near his palace at Souburg.36 Mostaert himself had connections not only to Margaret of Austria but also to the high noble Jan II van Wassenaer (c. 1483–1523), a courtier from Holland for whom the

See H.  Michelant, ‘Inventaire des vaisselles, joyaux, tapisseries, peintures, manuscrits,  etc. de Marguerite d’Autriche, régente et gouverante des Pays-Bas, dressé en son palais de Malines, le 9 juillet 1523’, Académie Royale des Sciences des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bulletin de la Commission Royal d’Histoire 12 (1871), 33–75, 83–136 (p. 110); and Weidema and Koopstra, Jan Gossart, p. 31, no. 23: ‘Item, ung beau tableau auquel est painct ung homme et une femme nuz, estant les pieds en l’eaue; le premier bord de mabre, le second doré et en bas ung escripteau, donné par Monsigneur d’Utrecht’. The description of the Adam and Eve statuettes recalls the work of the sculptor Conrad Meit, whom Margaret also employed. See Renate Eikelmann and others, Conrat Meit: Bildhauer der Renaissance (Münich: Hirmer Verlag, 2006), pp. 68–71, no. 1; pp. 80–83, no. 4. For analysis of Margaret of Austria’s collection, specifically Gossart’s Hermaphroditus and Salmacis and Meit’s Adam and Eve statuettes, see Dagmar Eichberger, Leben mit Kunst, Wirken durch Kunst: Sammelwesen und Hofkunst unter Margarete von Österreich, Regentin der Niederlande (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 109–12, 196, 298–301, 305–07, 364–65, 408–09. 34 The humanist Jean Lemaire de Belges was active at Margaret’s court and wrote an important treatise referencing an ancient tomb discovered outside Brussels in 1507. Lemaire records that Margaret’s father Emperor Maximilian delighted in visiting the site. The illustrated manuscript of Lemaire’s treatise is preserved in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, MS 3324; for a modern edition, see Jean Lemaire de Belges, Des anciennes pompes funeralles, ed. by Marie Madeleine Fontaine (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 2001), esp. pp. 98–99. See also Bass, Jan Gossart, pp. 42–43, Figure 28; and Marie Madeleine Fontaine, ‘Antiquaires et rites funéraires’, in Les Funérailles à la Renaissance: xiie colloque international de la Société Française d’Étude du Seizième Siècle, Bar-le-Duc, 2–5 Décembre 1999, ed. by Jean Balsamo (Geneva: Droz, 2002), pp. 329–55. 35 As described in the inventory reference (see n. 33), Gossart’s Hermaphroditus and Salmacis had two frames, the first painted to resemble marble (‘le premier bord de mabre’) and the second gilded (‘le second doré’). Gossart was a skilled painter of imitation marble and employed it frequently in his paintings. 36 On Philip of Burgundy’s interest in local antiquity and Geldenhouwer’s participation in this project, see Bass, Jan Gossart, pp. 45–73. See also Geldenhouwer’s highly effusive and rhetorical biography of his patron, which references Philip’s interest both in classical architecture and in reading ancient history. Geldenhouwer, Vita clarissimi principis, Philippi a Burgundia (Strasbourg: apud Christianum Aegenolphum, 1529), fols A6r, B3r; and Geldenhouwer, Collectanea van Gerardus Geldenhauer Noviomagus, ed. J. Prinsen, (Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1901), pp. 232, 241–42. 33

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artist painted a portrait that survives today in multiple copies.37 Wassenaer was ­championed by contemporary Netherlandish humanists for his military feats in the war against the duchy of Guelders, which bordered Holland to the east and had a long history of invading its neighbouring province.38 Wassenaer’s victories resulted in crucial reclaimed territory for Holland between 1521 and 1523, and inspired the local scholar Alardus of Amsterdam to figure the courtier as a local hero who surpassed even great ancient warriors like Hannibal, Achilles, and Hercules.39 Wassenaer himself promoted his personal claim to ancient lineage by ordering the excavation of the ruined Roman fortress known as Brittenburg, located just off the coast of his familial lands near Leiden.40 Regardless of whether Mostaert’s Eve and Four Children was commissioned by a noble patron, his association with courtly circles would have exposed him to this particular current of historical interest. In the same years, knowledge of local antiquity was also becoming accessible to a broader audience through the work of the Netherlandish humanist Cornelius Aurelius (c. 1460–1531).41 Like Geldenhouwer, Aurelius made a keen inquiry into Batavian history, but he did so with a more targeted agenda than his colleague. Aurelius aimed to establish a strong link between ancient Batavia and the province of Holland; in a rhetorical flourish akin to Alardus’s poem, he wrote that Jan II van Wassenaer was among the Holland noblemen descended from the original leaders of the Batavian tribe.42 Although Alardus’s treatise devoted to Batavia was not printed until decades after his death, he had already published a highly popular vernacular chronicle known as the Divisiekroniek in 1517, which promises in its full title to encompass the beginning of human history through the present.43 Aurelius’s None of the surviving versions of Mostaert’s portrait of Jan II van Wassenaer can be attributed to the artist himself, but the best version after Mostaert’s hand — which includes an elaborate narrative background — is in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, 47 × 33 cm, inv. no. M.I. 802. See Jacques Foucart, Catalogue des peintres flamandes et hollandaises du musée du Louvre (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), p. 47. Another copy, probably from the seventeenth century, is today in Leiden (Stedeijk Museum de Lakenhal, 76 × 53 cm, inv. no. S 131). See M. L. Wurfbain, Catalogus van de schilderijen en tekeningen (Leiden: Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhal, 1983), p.  232; and C.  C.  de Glopper-Zuijderland, 8 eeuwen Wassenaar (Wassenaar: Gemeente Wassenaar, 2004), p. 15. On both the Paris and Leiden copies, see Hoogewerff, De Noord-Nederlandsche Schilderkunst, ii, pp. 484–87; and Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, x, pp. 15, 71–72, nos 29–29a. A small version was also recently seen on the market in London (Sotheby’s, 6–7–2000, lot no. 23, 30 × 24.1 cm), and a drawing after the portrait appears in the Recueil d’Arras, see Albert Châtelet, Visages d’Autan: le Recueil d’Arras (Lathuile: Éditions du Gui, 2007), p. 242, nos 15–16. 38 For a useful summary of the history of the Guelders war and Wassenaer’s involvement, see James D. Tracy, Holland under Habsburg Rule, 1506–1566 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 64–89. 39 Alardus of Amsterdam, ‘Encomium Iohannis Wasserheer Herois imprimis illustris’, in Erasmus and Amsterdam, D.  Erasmi Roterdami de vitando pernitioso libidinosoque; aspectu carmen bucolicum, lectu dignissimum, cum scholijs Alardi Aemstelredami, cuius studio nunc primum et repertum et aeditum est (Leyden: Petruus Balenus excudebat, 1538), fols E4v–E7v (fol. E7v): ‘I nunc et effer splendidis mendaciis | I nunc et orna magnificis elogiis | Marios, Iugurthas, Hannibales, Asdrubales, | Magnos Alexandros, Carolos magnos, item | Pylios, Achilles, Hectores et Hercules. | Quotquot fuerunt aut duces aut principes | Si unum in locum vel conferas vel adlegas | Non comparandi sunt quidem cum Wassenaer’. For Jan II van Wassenaer’s biography and his role in the war with Guelders, see H. G. A. Obreen, Geschiedenis van het geslacht van Wassenaer (Leiden: A.  W. Sijthoff, 1903), pp.  38–41; P.  C. Molhuysen and P.  J. Blok, Nieuw Nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek, 10  vols (Leiden: A.  W. Sijthoff, 1911–37), ii (1912), pp.  1528–29; and Heren van stand: Van Wassenaer 1200–2000: Achthonderd jaar Nederlandse adelsgeschiedneis, ed.  by J.  Aalbers and others (Den Haag: Stichting Hollandse Historische Reeks, 2000), pp. 58–65. The elaborate display of arms in Jan II van Wassenaer’s funeral also vested him with the honour of an ancient hero. See discussion in Henk van Nierop, The Nobility of Holland: From Knights to Regents, 1500–1650, trans. by Maarten Ultee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1–5. 40 As recounted in a manuscript preserved in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag, MS 131, G 31, fols 3v–4r. See also Heren van Stand, pp. 59–60. 41 See the important study of Aurelius and his writings by Karin Tilmans, Historiography and Humanism in Holland in the Age of Erasmus: Aurelius and the Divisiekroniek of 1517 (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf Publishers, 1992). 42 Aurelius, Batavia sive de antiquo veroque eius insulae quam Rhenus in Hollandia facit situ, descriptione et laudibus, ed. by Bonaventura Vulcanius (Antwerp: Apud Christophorum Plantinum, 1586), p.  12: ‘His modo Wassenarii heroës absolute imperant, ex Claudio Civile et Cereale trahentes originem’. 43 Aurelius, De Cronycke van Hollandt, Zeelandt ende Vrieslant beghinnende van Adams tiden tot die geboerte Ons Heren Jhesum, voertgaende tot den jare M.CCCCC ende XVII (Leiden: Jan Seversz, 1517). 37

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chronicle depends largely on medieval precursors in its account of historical threads like the imagined Trojan genealogy of the Netherlandish nobility. Nonetheless, it also augments this venerable lineage with an extended discussion of the ancient Batavians in its opening chapter. Aurelius not only refers to contemporary archaeological finds confirming the Batavian presence in the region but also includes in his chronicle the first printed illustration of an ancient Roman artefact excavated from Netherlandish soil: a tile inscribed ‘Exercitus Germanici inf[erioris]’ (‘the army of Lower Germany’), as the Netherlands were known in Roman times.44 From the subsequent citation and use of Aurelius’s Divisiekroniek as a historical source, it is clear that the passages concerning Batavia were the most eagerly read of the chronicle’s chapters, presumably because they offered the latest and most exciting historical information.45 Aurelius situates his chapter on the Batavians directly following his account of Adam and Eve and the Flood. This seamless progression from biblical to ancient Roman times proves salient for considering the reception of Mostaert’s Eve and Four Children. Beginning with the chapter on Adam and Eve, it is striking how closely Mostaert’s painting resonates with Aurelius’s account: Sien aten oec niet gecocte spise, uuten welcken te mercken is dat si weinich of geen vier gehaten hebben noch te coken noch te backen noch oec hen te warmen, ende hadden peltsen cleideren vanden vellen der scapen, ende woonden in die culen ende holen der aerden […] Adam in den XV jaer nadat hi gescapen was teelde hi an Eve zijnre huisvrou enen soen geheten Caym ende zijn suster Calmana, ende waren de eerst van vrou ende man geboren. Ende daer na inden XXX jaer, heeft hi geteelt Abel ende sijn suster Delbora. Want Eva brochte altijt ter werelt tot eenre geboorte een knechtken ende een meysken, als Josephus de Juessche meester scrivet in sine cronike. Si leefden alle haer dagen in strenger penitencie, om der sonden willen der ongehoersaemheit, ende leiden een heilich leven verwachtende barmhertichteit ende ghenade alsoe grootelick, dat Adam begavet wert mitter gaven der prophecien, ende wert een prophete. Ende propheteerde vander incarnatie ende gheboerte ons Heren Jesu Christi […] Dese Caym vermoerde Abel sinen broeder uut hat ende nijt, ende daer om wert hi van god vermaledijt […] Ende Adam bescreide Abel sinen soen C jaer ende hadde gheloeft bi sinen wive niet meer te slapen noch te bekennen. Dwelck hem god ofnam, ende geboet hem de geloftenisse te breken. Ende als Adam oudt was was CC jaer ende XXX soe bekende hi sine huysvrouwe ende si ghebaerde enen soen gheheten Seth. Ende van dien sijn wi alle ghecomen.46 [Adam and Eve] ate very little cooked food, which indicates that they had little or no fire either for cooking or baking or to warm themselves. For clothing, they wore furs made from the hides of sheep and they lived in the caves and holes of the earth […] in the fifteenth year after his creation, Adam and his wife Eve gave birth to a son named Cain and his sister Calmana, and they were the first born of woman and man. And thereafter in his thirtieth year he sired Abel and his sister Delbora. This was because Eve always brought into the world at once both a boy 44 Aurelius, De Cronycke, fol. 92r. See also Bass, Jan Gossart, pp. 100–01, Figure 72, and Tilmans, Historiography, p. 98. The tile represents one of several that were found in the early sixteenth century at the ancient site of Roomburg near Leiden. On Roomburg, see Chrystel R. Brandenburgh and Wilfried A. M. Hessing, Matilo - Rodenburg - Roomburg: De Roomburgerpolder van Romeins castellum tot moderne woonwijk (Leiden: Dienst Bouwen en Wonen, 2005). 45 Tilmans, Historiography, pp. 306–07. 46 Aurelius, De Cronycke, fols 2v–3r. Aurelius’s account is closely indebted to medieval apocryphal writings on the life of Adam and Eve, on which see Brian Murdoch, The Apocryphal Adam and Eve in Medieval Europe: Vernacular Translations and Adaptations of the ‘Vita Adae et Eve’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 1–41.

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and a girl, as Josephus the Jewish scholar writes in his chronicle. And they lived all their days in strict penitence for their sins and their lack of faith. They led a holy life of mercy and peace so much so that Adam was endowed with the gifts of prophecy and became a prophet, and prophesied the incarnation and birth of our Lord Jesus Christ […] but then Cain murdered Abel his brother out of hate and spite. And because of this he was cursed by God […] and Adam mourned Abel his son for a hundred years and vowed never again to sleep with his wife or to know her. However, God compelled Adam to break this promise when he was two hundred and thirty years old and so he knew his wife once again and she bore him a son named Seth, and it is from him that we are all descended.

Mostaert’s composition parallels Aurelius’s representation of Adam, Eve, and their children as a pre-civilized family. They live in caves, wear furs, and have only small fires and modest meals as comfort: a simple life that accords with the Christian ideal of humble piety. In this regard, Aurelius’s narrative, which pivots on the moment of Adam’s grieving over the murder of Abel, may also shed light on the first father’s absence from Mostaert’s painting. Perhaps in omitting Adam, Mostaert meant to recall his century of mourning and penitential estrangement from Eve following the tragic death depicted in the picture’s upper left. The painting does include four children that might plausibly be associated with Cain, Calmana, Abel, and Delbora, suggesting that the temporal span of Mostaert’s composition ends just prior to the birth of Seth. Yet this passage from the Divisiekroniek also shows that Aurelius was less interested in Adam and Eve themselves than in how the couple’s history prefigured the subsequent chapters of human history recounted within his chronicle, from ancient Batavia to presentday Holland. Along comparable lines, Mostaert’s insistent allusion to the Virgin Mary in Eve and Four Children may imply that he deemed it less important to represent Adam clumsily weaving a basket in some corner (as he does in Kerver’s Hours) than to imply his future counterpart in Christ, whose birth — according to Aurelius — Adam himself had prophesied. In Adam’s absence, Eve’s fertile body is no longer tied restrictively to the Old Testament narrative. Mostaert’s representation of Eve and her children could be understood by his Netherlandish audience as the point of origin for their Batavian ancestors as well as their Christian faith. Adam and Eve in the New World Mostaert was not alone in harnessing the figures of the First Family as a means to evoke the unfamiliar image of other ‘primitive’ peoples. This approach occurs elsewhere in early sixteenth-century art and even in Mostaert’s own oeuvre.47 His best-known work is identified from its description by Karel van Mander as a West-Indies Landscape (Figure  8).48 The For a German Renaissance example of visual association between exotic peoples and Adam and Eve, see Stephanie Leitch, Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 63–99, esp. pp. 89–91; and Stephanie Leitch, ‘Burgkmair’s Peoples of Africa and India (1508) and the Origins of Ethnography in Print’, The Art Bulletin, 91.2 (2009), 134–59. 48 Van Mander, The Lives, i, p. 176, fol. 229v: ‘Daer is oock een Landtschap, wesende een West-Indien, met veel naeckt volck, met een bootsighe Clip, en vreemt ghebouw van huysen en hutten: doch is onvoldaen gelaten’. For Mostaert’s West-Indies Landscape, dated c. 1535, formerly in Haarlem’s Frans Hals Museum, and the collection of the heir of Jacques Goudstikker, now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (86.5 × 152.5 cm, inv. no. SK–A–5021), see Neeltje Köhler and others, Painting in Haarlem 1500–1850: The Collection of the Frans Hals Museum (Ghent: Ludion, 2006), pp. 559–61, no. 335; Mostaert: The Discovery of America (London: Simon C. Dickinson LLC, 2013); and Matthias Ubl, ‘Scène uit de verovering van Amerika: Jan Jansz Mostaert (Haarlem c. 1474–1552/3 Haarlem)’, Bulletin van de Vereniging Rembrandt 23.2 (2013), 23–27. 47

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Place, Space,Batavia, and Literary the New Performance World, andinthe Sixteenth-Century Origins of Humankind Bruges

Fig. 8: Jan Mostaert, West-Indies Landscape, c. 1535. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, inv. no. SK-A-5021.

painting registers both the contemporary fascination with the inhabitants of the New World and the necessity of extrapolating from still meagre knowledge of their actual appearance.49 In the early sixteenth-century Netherlands, Mostaert could have drawn only on scant textual and material sources. There were exotic American gold and featherwork objects housed in the collections of aforementioned nobles like Margaret of Austria and Philip of Burgundy, which hinted at the otherness and artistic skill of the distant culture that produced them.50 In the anonymous Netherlandish painting of Adam and Eve’s postlapsarian family mentioned above, the fanciful feathered accents and headdresses on three of the children in the foreground may allude precisely to these coveted objects (Figure 6). Along parallel lines, utopian descriptions by contemporary authors like the Italian scholar Peter Martyr imagine life in the New World prior to the Spanish conquest as akin to the ancient Golden Age, a time when humankind cohabited in blissful harmony and persisted simply off the land.51 Mostaert’s West-Indies Landscape seems to favour this positive interpretation, and to share in the impulse to blur the lines between ancient, biblical, and New World history. In his horizontal composition, a strange encounter unfolds between the local inhabitants Alessandro Russo, ‘Horizontlinie, Point of no Return. Die Ankunft der Spanier an der Küste Mexikos in den Illustrationen des Codex Durán’, in Das Meer, der Tausch und die Grenzen der Repräsentation, ed. by Gerhard Wolf (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2010), pp. 317–28 (pp. 317–19) suggests the very schematic title woodcut of Christopher Columbus’s De insulis in mare Indico nuper inventis (1494) as a possible visual model for Mostaert’s composition. Russo also posits that Mostaert may have drawn inspiration for his fleeing nude figures from fifteenth-century Netherlandish paintings of the Last Judgment. 50 Paul Vandenbroeck, ‘Amerindian Art and Ornamental Objects in Royal Collections: Brussels, Mechelen, Duurstede, 1520–1530’, in America, Bride of the Sun: 500 Years Latin America and the Low Countries, ed. by Paul Vandenbroeck (Ghent; Brussels: Ministry of the Flemish Community, Administration of External Relations, 1991), pp. 99–120. 51 See Peter Martyr, P.  Martyris Angli mediolanensis opera. Legatio Babylonica oceani decas, poemata, epigrammata (Hispali: Per Jacobum Corumberger Alemanum, 1511), fol. E1v: ‘Compertum est apud eos (velut solem et aquam) terram esse commune; neque meum aut tuum (malorum omnius semina) cadere inter ipsos. Sunt enim adeo parvo contenti, quod in ea vasta tellure magis agri supersint quam quicquam desit. Etas est illis aurea; neque fossis, neque parietibus aut sepibus predia sepiunt. Apertis vivunt hortis, sine legibus, sine libris, sine iudicibus suapte natura rectum colunt. Malum ac scelestum eum iudicant, qui inferre cuiquam iniuriam delectatur’. See also Moffitt, ‘Een West-Indien landtschap’, pp. 106–10. 49

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and an invading European army storming across the hill on the far right. Although the New World subjects have been identified variously as a representation of the Brazilian Tupinamba tribe or as native North Americans, the painting is best understood as a fanciful and generalized encounter between the innocent savage and the conquering figures of civilization. On the far left, a naked couple reminiscent of Adam and Eve emerges from a rustic hut, emblematic of the postlapsarian but pre-Christian state of these New World figures. Here Mostaert draws on motifs recognizable to his audience so as to render primitive existence more readily comprehensible, but he also resists the portrayal of his subjects as ‘savages’, emphasizing instead the cruelty of the conquering foreigners. The encounter depicted in the compositional centre of the West-Indies Landscape links back provocatively to a detail in Mostaert’s small painting of the First Family. The artist encapsulates the foreign incursion into the New World through a single contest between a naked figure fallen to the ground and an armoured European raising a sword above his head. To the left of this encounter, a woman flails her arms in flight while another retreats with her two children: reactions that again signal the brutality of the invaders. The losing battle of the hapless native man against the armed soldier is almost identical to Mostaert’s depiction of the fatal struggle between Cain and Abel in Eve and Four Children. This repetition is hardly coincidental; Mostaert employs the grouping yet again in his large narrative painting The Expulsion of Hagar to represent the combat between Abraham’s sons Ishmael and Isaac.52 While artists commonly preserve compositional motifs for reuse in their workshops, these reiterations of struggle in Mostaert’s landscape compositions — across narrative and geographical boundaries — suggest more than a practice of mere convenience. They attest to a complex conceptual process underlying the imaging of history, which involved the same kind of associative strategy that underlies the First Family woodcut on the title-page of Geldenhouwer’s Batavian treatise. In returning repeatedly to the same emblematic motif across his oeuvre, Mostaert seems to recognize a parity between the narratives of humanity found in the Old Testament, the Batavian past, and the New World. In both Eve and Four Children and the WestIndies Landscape, the artist explores the tenuous boundary between virtue and violence that underlies human civilization. Mostaert’s paintings, like the snowmen of Adam and Eve in the Brussels winter festival, participated in a much larger discursive field than their ostensible subjects might at first suggest. Yet if the naked snowmen in Brussels, savage yet free of shame, embody prelapsarian man, the figures in Mostaert’s Eve and Four Children hover on the precipice that divides past and present. Eve’s polysemous body, prominent even to the point of displacing Adam altogether, stands as the generative point of origin not only for the immediate children pictured beside her but also for every other distant ancestor or people, whether the former Batavians on Netherlandish shores or the current inhabitants of a strange newfound continent. It is the story of humankind between a primitive and civilized state, between ancient and Christian times — far more than any single narrative — that Mostaert’s painting proffered for its contemporary viewers to contemplate. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 94  ×  131 cm, inv. no.  294 (1930.77). Abraham gestures with his right hand from the foreground of the painting towards the background, where Isaac and Ishmael are fighting. Ishmael was born not of Abraham’s wife Sarah but of their handmaiden Hagar, and it was this altercation that prompted Abraham to expel Hagar and Ishmael from his home. As with Cain’s murder of Abel in Eve and Four Children, the fighting scene is pivotal to the entire narrative composition.

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Frans Floris and the Poetics of Mythological Painting in Antwerp Giancarlo Fiorenza California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

When Frans Floris (1519/20–70) decorated the facade of his Antwerp house around 1562–65, he staged an urban dialogue on the integral relationship between painting and poetry. The pictorial decoration, now destroyed but known through later drawings and engravings, consisted of a central over-door showing an allegory of the arts, including figures representing Painting and Sculpture accompanied by Apollo and Fame.1 Flanking the overdoor were seven personifications displayed in niches and conceived as simulated bronze sculptures, from left to right: Diligentia, Usus, Poesis (Figure  1), Architectura, Labor, Experientia, and Industria. As a major producer of mythological paintings in Antwerp, Floris envisioned the decoration as a civic gesture that would advertise his inventive poetic powers to a broad public and simultaneously target potential clients. ‘Poesis’ (Poetry), according to Giovanni Boccaccio’s highly popular Genealogie deorum gentilium (first published in Venice in 1472, and then in Leuven in 1473), ‘est fervor quidam exquisite inveniendi’ (‘is a sort of fervid and exquisite invention’), one that necessarily employs elegant arrangement and adornment to produce sublime effects.2 Renaissance treatises on art ranging from Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura (1435) to Paolo Pino’s Dialogo di pittura (1548), published just a few years after Floris’s return from an extended sojourn in Italy, concur. They further define the exercise of pictorial invention as no ordinary illustration of a text, but as an imaginative process of discovery — the systematic search for and demonstration of a theme or argument often related to nature and the human condition, and originating in ancient fable.3 Pino explicitly equates painting with the fictive Studies of the facade decoration include Carl Van de Velde, ‘The Painted Decoration of Floris’s House’, in Netherlandish Mannerism: Papers Given at a Symposium in the Nationalmuseum Stockholm, ed. by Görel Cavalli-Björkman (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 1985), pp. 127–34; Zirka Zaremba Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp 1550–1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 35–39; and Catherine King, ‘Artes Liberales and the Mural Decoration on the House of Frans Floris, Antwerp, c. 1565’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 52 (1989), 239–56. See also Edward H. Wouk, The New Hollstein: Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts 1450–1700: Frans Floris, 2 parts (Ouderkerk aan den Ijssel: Sound and Vision, 2011), ii, pp. 160–62 nn. 140–47. 2 Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, 2 vols, ed. by Vincenzo Romano (Bari: Giuseppe Laterza e Figli, 1951), ii, p. 699; and Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s ‘Genealogia deorum gentilium’, 2nd edn, trans. by Charles G. Osgood (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 39. 3 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and Sculpture: The Latin Texts of ‘De Pictura’ and ‘De Statua’, ed. and trans. by Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), pp. 94–97; and Paolo Pino, Dialogo di pittura, in Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, 3 vols, ed. by Paola Barocchi (Bari: Laterza, 1960–62), i, pp. 93–119 (p. 115). See also Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 101; Martin Kemp, ‘From “Mimesis” to “Fantasia”: The Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration and Genius in the Visual Arts’, Viator, 8 (1977), 347–98; Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 24–30; and Stephen J. Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the ‘Studiolo’ of Isabella d’Este (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 1–13. 1

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 229-243. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114010

Giancarlo Fiorenza

Fig. 1: Monogrammist TG (?), Poesis, after Frans Floris, engraving, 1576. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna. Photo: museum.

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and organizing power of poetry, both of which he sees as rooted in invention: ‘la pittura è propria poesia, cioè invenzione’ (‘painting is rightly poetry, that is, invention’).4 It is in such original discovery that painters and poets find their common identity. Accordingly, Floris signed his panel of Saint Luke Painting the Virgin (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp), destined as a gift for the city’s guild hall of Saint Luke, with an abbreviated signature that distinguishes his diligence (or ability to execute the work) from his divinely inspired inventive capacity: ‘FF. IV. ET F. 1556’ (‘Frans Floris invenit et fecit 1556’).5 At the time Floris decorated his facade, the Venetian painter Titian, in his letters to King Philip II of Spain (who also ruled the Netherlands), labelled his Roman historical and mythical representations as poesie (‘poems’), favole (‘fables’), and inventioni (‘inventions’).6 The appeal to poetics by both Titian and Floris challenges conventional notions of a narrow iconographic source and instead endorses poetry as a generative and interpretive tool united with pictorial invention.7 Floris offered his Antwerp public an enticing visual testimonial to the poetics of artistic invention, whereas his pupil, the artist and poet Lucas de Heere (1534–84), championed painting over poetry in his Den Hof en Boomgaerd der Poësien (‘The Garden and Orchard of Poetry’). Published in Ghent in 1565, this pioneering volume of Flemish poetry incorporates Greek, Latin, and French models, and contains over seventy poems (including odes, epigrams, sonnets, elegies, epitaphs, blasons, and epistles), several of which are dedicated to Netherlandish artists and poets. Throughout the volume, De Heere adduces the relative merits of painting and poetry. In his dedication to Admiral Adolf of Burgundy, he invokes Horace’s theory of ut pictura poesis and further defines invention (inuencie) as the hallmark of poetic excellence.8 Painting’s supremacy appears most clearly in the refrain addressed to De Violieren, Antwerp’s principal chamber of rhetoric, which had incorporated with the Guild of Saint Luke around 1480. Again ­borrowing from the Horatian doctrine that successful poetry combines profit with ­pleasure (that it is dulce et utile), De Heere claims that painting is the most orborelick (‘useful’) and vermakelick (‘delightful’) of all the arts. Painting should not be considered mute poetry, but a mirror of nature, Maer zoo wel sprekende datmen eer yet can mercken Deur een rechte schilderye, staende in huus oft kercken, Dan dicmaels deur de woorden, d’lesen oft schrijuen. Pino, Dialogo di pittura, i, p. 115. For studies of this image in its broader artistic context, see Van de Velde, Frans Floris 1519/20–1570: Leven en Werken, 2  vols (Brussels: Paleis der Academien, 1975), i, pp.  237–38; as well as Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, pp.  11–39; Annette de Vries, ‘Reformulating St Luke: Frans Floris on Art and Diligence’, in Understanding Art in Antwerp: Classicizing the Popular, Popularising the Classic, ed. Bart Ramakers (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), pp. 37–51; and Bram de Klerck, ‘ShortSighted? Rijckaert Aertsz Portraying the Virgin in a Painting by Frans Floris’, Oud Holland, 124 (2011), 65–80. Floris signed numerous paintings, especially his mythological ones, in a similar manner. 6 Titian refers to his Rape of Europa, now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, as both a favola (letter 22 April 1560) and a poesia (letter 26 April 1562). Furthermore, he calls another of his paintings ‘un’altra inventione di pittura’ (letter 26 October 1568), most likely his Tarquin and Lucretia in the Fitzwilliam Collection, Cambridge. See Matteo Mancini, Tiziano e le corti d’Asburgo nei documenti degli archivi spagnoli (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienza, Lettere, ed Arti, 1998), pp. 263, 289, 355. 7 Lodovico Guicciardini praises Floris as unsurpassed in invention and design (‘d’inventione e di disegno’) in his Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (Antwerp: Guglielmo Silvio, 1567), p. 99. 8 Lucas de Heere, Den Hof en Boomgaerd der Poësien, ed. by W. Waterschoot (Zwolle: Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde te Leiden, 1969), pp. 2–3. See also Ramakers, ‘Art and Artistry in Lucas de Heere’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 59 (2009), 164–92. 4 5

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Zi hout ons voor ooghen voorle’en daden en wercken Zoo leuendich als oft wy die zaghen bedrijuen. Zi voorbeeldt de passien van mannen en wijuen, Alle naturen, zeden, beesten, steden, wonsten. So eloquent that one frequently observes in a true picture, hanging at home or in church, what one does not from words, or from reading or writing. She enlivens past deeds and works, placing them before our eyes as if they were occurring. She expresses the passions of men and women, as well as their natures, customs, animals, cities, habitations.9

Painting’s sweet eloquence supplants poetry in representing universal experiences. With De Heere’s volume appearing at the same time as Floris’s decoration on the facade of his house, a learned urban audience in the Low Countries would have been well prepared to perceive and to judge connections between painting and poetry. Just as Antwerp fostered a dynamic cultural attitude towards the arts, given the personal and professional connections of artists and humanists between the city and others — such as Ghent (where De Heere was based) and Haarlem (where Maarten van Heemskerck worked with polymath Dirck Coornhert and humanist Hadrianus Junius) — one can imagine comparable ideas circulating throughout the Low Countries. The healthy rivalry between painting and poetry invites a reexamination of De Heere’s Inuectiue, an eenen Quidam schilder: de welke beschimpte de Schilders van Handwerpen (‘Invective Against a Certain Painter Who Scoffed at the Painters of Antwerp’), which appears in his Den Hof en Boomgaerd der Poësien.10 De Heere composed this invective to defend his teacher against severe criticisms by an unnamed artist, who sneeringly dismisses Floris’s paintings as suuckerbeeldekens (‘sugar-images’) because they are verciert becamelic (‘ornamented becomingly’) and rijcke (‘richly’). De Heere counters by explaining that, although Floris does paint in this way, he does so ‘’Niet allomme: maer daert behoort en betaemt’ (‘Not all over, but where it belongs and is beseeming’). Furthermore, he states that the anonymous critic’s own works are entirely onghemaniert (‘artless’) and ornamented like kaeremespoppen (‘kermis dolls’), explaining that the critic’s visit to Rome had no impact on his paintings, ‘Die voorwaer noch Roomachtig, noch ooc antijcx en siet’ (‘That truly look neither Romish, nor antique’).11 A number of art historians have interpreted De Heere’s comments in light of the vernacular, in terms of an argument between Flemish and Italian pictorial modes of expression about everything from style to subject matter.12 Floris’s paintings have been compared to those of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (d. 1569), who is often proposed as the anonymous De Heere, Den Hof en Boomgaerd, p. 109. Translation by Walter S. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s ‘Schilder-Boeck’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p.  137. Melion provides an informative discussion of the artistic context of De Heere’s passage (pp.  129–42). See also Ramakers, ‘Art and Artistry in Lucas de Heere’, p. 178. 10 De Heere, Den Hof en Boomgaerd, pp. 80–82. I have used Mark Meadow’s translation of this invective in his article ‘Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary, Aemulatio and the Space of Vernacular Style’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 47 (1996), 180–205 (pp. 181–82). 11 Meadow, ‘Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary’, p. 181, translates ‘onghemaniert’ as ‘unmannered’. 12 See, for example, David Freedberg, ‘Allusion and Topicality in the Work of Pieter Bruegel: The Implications of a Forgotten Polemic’, in The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, ed.  by Freedberg (Tokyo: Shimbun, 1989), pp.  53–65; and Meadow, ‘Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary’, pp. 181–205. 9

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critical artist and, somewhat surprisingly, is also the artist most studied with regard to De Heere’s invective. Recently, Joost Keizer and Todd M. Richardson have contended that the vernacular is not strictly about regional styles and outward appearances, but rather is more about developing a new, assimilative, and enriched form of expression in the verbal and visual arts, based on select models from the ancient and the modern; the familiar and the foreign.13 Both authors have demonstrated the importance of French literary models for Netherlandish vernacular expression. In contrast, James Bloom considers De Heere’s invective in relation to the vernacular aspects of function, space, medium, and display, noting that Floris and Bruegel shared a major patron, the wealthy merchant Niclaes Jongelinck (1517–70), and that many of their most famous paintings were displayed under one roof at his suburban Antwerp villa Ter Beken.14 Considering the larger poetic context of Den Hof en Boomgaerd der Poësien, De Heere’s invective clearly reads as more than either a zealous defence of his teacher or one painter critiquing another. By emphasizing that Floris’s paintings should be praised rather than disparaged for being verciert, becamelic, and rijcke — all the more so because they are well composed for the viewer to enjoy — De Heere borrows critical terms from the theory and practice of French Renaissance poets, to whom his volume is largely indebted. The reception and circulation of French poetry in the Netherlands was profuse and supplied a model of imitation for numerous vernacular works. Jan Cauweel, who published Matthijs de Castelein’s De Const van Rhetoriken posthumously in Ghent in 1555, championed the embellishment, printing, and distribution of Netherlandish poetic and rhetorical arts based on the example of the Pléiade poets.15 Accordingly, while he modelled much of his poetry after the example of Clement Marot (1496–1544) — who is invoked by name in one poem — De Heere’s sonnets and odes, two new genres in Netherlandish poetry, share close affinities with the work of Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85) and other poets of the Pléiade.16 As Terence Cave and Philip Ford have demonstrated, the poetics of abundance (copia) and ornament — especially in descriptions of nature, myth, and art — is fundamental to the literary enterprise of this group of sixteenth-century French poets.17 Ronsard, in his 1552 ode See Joost Keizer and Todd  M. Richardson, ‘Introduction: The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts’, in The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts, ed. by Keizer and Richardson (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 1–23; Richardson, ‘Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Vernacular Cultivation’, in Understanding Art in Antwerp, pp.  115–30; and Richardson, Pieter Bruegel The Elder: Art Discourse in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 23–61. 14 James  J. Bloom, ‘Pictorial Babel: Inventing the Flemish Visual Vernacular’, in The Transformation of Vernacular Expression, pp. 313–38. 15 See Ramakers, ‘As Many Lands, As Many Customs: Vernacular Self-Awareness among the Netherlandish Rhetoricians’, in The Transformation of Vernacular Expression, pp.  123–77, esp. pp.  138–51. For the key literary personalities involved in the reception, circulation, and imitation of French poetry in the Netherlands, see also Karel Bostoen, Dichterschap en koopmanschap in de zestiende eeuw: Omtrent de dichters Guillaume de Poetou en Jan van der Noot (Deventer: Sub Rosa, 1987); and Marco Prandoni, ‘Vive la France, À bas la France! Contradictory Attitude Toward the Appropriation of French Cultural Elements in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century: The Forewords of “Modern” Poetry Collections’, in Wissenstransfer und Auctoritas in der frühneuzeitlichen niederländischsprachigen Literatur, ed. by Bettina Noak (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2014), pp. 179–94. 16 On the importance of French literature for the development of new poetic genres in Dutch poetry, see Waterschoot, ‘Marot or Ronsard? New French Poetics among Dutch Rhetoricians in the Second Half of the 16th Century’, in RhetoricRhetoriqueurs-Rederijkers, ed. by J. Koopmans and others (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1995), pp. 141–56; and Keizer and Richardson, ‘Introduction’. 17 See Terence Cave, ‘Ronsard’s Mythological Universe’, in Ronsard the Poet, ed. by Cave (London: Methuen and Co., 1973), pp.  159–208; Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp.  3–34; and Philip Ford, Ronsard’s ‘Hymnes’: A  Literary and Iconographical Study (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), pp. 50–53. 13

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À Michel de l’Hospital, Chancelier de France, has the Muses (metaphors for his own poetry) call upon Jupiter to make their immortal song ‘[p]asse en douceur le sucre dous’ (‘surpass sweet sugar in its sweetness’),18 just those qualities that De Heere admires in Floris’s paintings. De Heere even advises Floris’s critic to suykeren (‘sweeten’) his own works so that they appear less bitterder (‘bitter’) and more palatable to other artists. Poets like Ronsard — who eschews dry, technical skill in favour of fureur divine (‘divine fury’)19 — nonetheless temper copiousness and variety with proper dispositio, the structuring or orderly arrangement of a work of art, which is equivalent to Floris’s sense of suitability.20 Den Hof en Boomgaerd der Poësien offers Floris’s paintings as vivid and praiseworthy visual analogues to the ornamental poetry being produced in France and the Netherlands. De Heere, like several of Floris’s pupils, was closely connected with artists and poets at the French court, having worked for Catherine de’ Medici around 1560 designing tapestries. In Antwerp, he was friends with the poet Jan van der Noot (c.  1539–after 1595), whose lyrical sonnets contained in his volume Het Bosken (‘The Small Wood’), published in 1570/1 while the author was in exile in London, are indebted to Ronsard’s love poetry and are composed in a metre novel to Netherlandish literature. Both De Heere and Van der Noot brought elements of the style and subject matter of French literature and classical antiquity to their poetry and further promoted their own endeavours in this area among rhetoricians in Antwerp.21 I therefore see De Heere as critically assessing Floris’s paintings not solely in pictorial terms, but also in terms of the poetic and rhetorical principles being developed by the Pléiade in their efforts to demonstrate that French could rival ancient Latin and Greek in poetic excellence.22 Although Italy played an important role in Floris’s artistic formation, his paintings welcome comparisons with the inventive aspects of French poetry, especially in their liberal display of ornament, surface textures, and beauty — not just the beauty of the human body and of nature, but also of exquisite artifice. His mythological paintings promote such themes as love, desire, and sensuality; at the same time, he imitates and refashions ancient Greek and Latin authors, cultivating the wit and irony of Lucian and amplifying the more sensual and pictorial aspects of the expressive diction of Lucretius and Virgil.23 In this respect, my essay complements the broader language project of Keizer and Richardson by focusing on the poetic foundation of Floris’s pictorial inventions. Pierre de Ronsard, ‘À Michel de l’Hospital, Chancelier de France’, in Selected Poems, trans. by Malcolm Quainton and Elizabeth Vinestock (London: Penguin Books, 2002) pp. 69–77 (p. 69), verse 344. 19 Ronsard, ‘À Michel’, p. 73, verse 435. 20 See Ford, Ronsard’s ‘Hymnes’, pp. 31–45. 21 See Waterschoot, ‘Marot or Ronsard?’; Keizer and Richardson, ‘Introduction’; Ramakers, ‘As Many Lands, As Many Customs’, pp. 151–58; and Bostoen, Dichterschap en koopmanschap. 22 Central to the French literary project was Joachim Du Bellay’s 1549 La Deffence, et illustration de la langue françoyse. Notably, in his chapter ‘Du long poëme francoys’, which expresses the desire for an epic composed in French, Du Bellay’s models are, of course, Homer and Virgil, but he also cites the Ferrarese poet Ludovico Ariosto, whose vernacular romance epic Orlando furioso (final edition 1532; French translation 1543) served as an Italian example of what could be achieved in France. 23 Imitatio (‘imitation’) was a powerful creative principle in all realms of Renaissance culture. Studies on the theory and practice of imitation in the Renaissance demonstrate that imitatio determined the dialectical relationship between Renaissance humanists and artists and the cultural achievements of the past, be it through continuity and reanimation or rupture and transformation. See, among other studies, Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); G.  W. Pigman, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980), 1–32; Ramakers, ‘Art and Artistry in Lucas de Heere’, pp. 170–78; and Cave, The Cornucopian Text, pp. 35–77. I offer a case study of pictorial imitation — or, more precisely, emulation (aemulatio) — involving Dosso Dossi’s Jupiter Painting Butterflies (National Art Collection, Wawel Royal Castle, Kraków), in Giancarlo Fiorenza, Dosso Dossi: Paintings of Myth, Magic, and the Antique (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), pp. 21–48. 18

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Indeed, the poetic character of Floris’s paintings, in both their making and their reception, should come as no surprise, especially given the intimate ties between artists and rhetoricians in sixteenth-century Antwerp.24 Tianna Uchacz’s essay in this volume, ‘Mars, Venus, and Vulcan: Equivocal Erotics and Art in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp’, highlights the rich cross-fertilization among the dramatic and visual arts in Antwerp with regard to mythological and historical narratives. Floris, moreover, was closely engaged with the Antwerp publishing house of Hieronymus Cock, which was recognized for its humanist foundation and its working relationship with such intellectuals and artistic patrons as the statesman and bishop (later cardinal) Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (1517–86).25 Among the numerous mythological subjects he painted and invented for prints, Floris’s Apollo and the Muses, engraved by Frans Huys and published by Cock in 1565, contains an abbreviated passage from one of the most important Renaissance mythographic texts based on poetic sources: Lilio Gregorio Giraldi’s De deis gentium (Basel, 1548).26 It is also worth considering the poem by Domenicus Lampsonius, written in praise of Jongelinck, that forms the dedication to a series of engravings of the Labours of Hercules, which was executed by Cornelius Cort after Floris in 1563. Lampsonius celebrates Jongelinck for cultivating leisure while savouring paintings by the divine hand of Floris (Diuina Flori dextera). He admires how Floris’s pictorial cycle not only adorned the patron’s house, but also enhanced the prestige of Antwerp, serving as a stepping stone for a broader discourse on the arts: Suos alumnos mittat aedes uisere, Quas tu minorum ciuium Natus bono, potens opum, sed omnium Ardens amator atrium, Tenacitatis idem et osor sordidae, Hostisque iuratissimus, Non usitatis prope superbam Anuerpiam Ad astra structas sumptibus. Let Italy send her pupils to visit the house which you, born of good stock from the lesser citizens, possessed of wealth but an ardent lover of all the arts, also a hater of sordid avarice and its sworn enemy, raised to the stars near proud Antwerp at unusual expense.27

24 See, for example, Walter  S. Gibson, ‘Artists and Rederijkers in the Age of Bruegel’, The Art Bulletin, 63  (1981), 426–46. 25 On Floris’s prints and his connection with humanists, see the excellent ‘Introduction’ by Wouk in The New Hollstein, i, pp.  xxxiii–civ, esp. pp.  xxxv–xxxvi. For example, Floris’s The Raising of the Brazen Serpent, engraved by Pieter van der Heyden in 1555, carries a dedication to Granvelle (Wouk, The New Hollstein, i, p. 59 n. 25). See also Hieronymous Cock: The Renaissance in Print, ed. by Joris Van Grieken, Ger Luijten, and Jan Van der Stock (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2013). As is well known, Floris studied from 1538 to 1539 in the artistic academy in Liège founded by Lambert Lombard, which boasted a curriculum that encompassed myth and antiquity and was thus aligned with humanist interests. See Godelieve Denhaene, Lambert Lombard: Renaissance et Humanisme à Liège (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1990). 26 Wouk, The New Hollstein, ii, pp. 5–6 n. 63. This engraving is based on a lost canvas Floris painted for the Arch of the Genoese, which was erected in celebration of Philip II’s entry to Antwerp in 1549. 27 Wouk, The New Hollstein, ii, p.  15; translation by Iain Buchanan, ‘The Collection of Niclaes Jongelinck: II. The “Months” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’, The Burlington Magazine, 132 (1990), 541–50 (p. 547). See also Van de Velde, ‘The Labours of Hercules, a Lost Series of Paintings by Frans Floris’, The Burlington Magazine, 107 (1965), 114–23.

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Fig. 2: Frans Floris, Feast of the Gods, oil on panel, late 1550s. Universalmuseum Joanneum, Alte Galerie, Graz. Photo: museum.

Floris’s paintings constitute an assimilative genre in their richness of invention; by refashioning mythological subjects through the filter of ancient and modern poetry, they invite inquiry on the very theme of artistic creation. An important example is Floris’s Feast of the Gods (now in the Universalmuseum Joanneum, Alte Galerie, Graz), an oil painting on panel signed ‘FF. IV. ET FA.’, which dates to the late 1550s (Figure 2).28 Its original patron is unknown, but this lacuna need not stand in the way of interpreting how the work may have been experienced. Saturn, seen from behind, presides over a sumptuous banquet of the gods set within a lush, covered grove and laid out on a marvellous gold tablecloth, indicating its era as the Golden Age. All the gods are nude or scarcely clad, seated in pairs (e.g., Mars and Venus; Bacchus and Ceres), and embracing, kissing, or encouraging one another to eat and drink. Oysters and wine are the primary fare. (From antiquity through the Renaissance, oysters were considered a popular aphrodisiac and the food of Venus, goddess of love and fertility.)29 Infant Cupids (erotes) swarm about the composition while Apollo plays the lyre and Mercury the flute, enhancing the lyrical and sensuous atmosphere. It is a rich composition, one that encompasses such themes as fecundity, eroticism, and natural abundance, bounties that are highly alluring to the harpies who try to despoil the festivities. The garden setting has strong erotic associations in both French and Italian Neo-Latin and vernacular poetry, and Floris’s image of a See Van de Velde, Frans Floris, i, pp. 258–59. See Liana De Girolami Cheney, ‘The Oyster in Dutch Genre Paintings: Moral or Erotic Symbolism’, Artibus et Historiae, 8 (1987), 135–58.

28 29

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lush bower, set with golden textiles and dinnerware, populated by gods eating, drinking, and making love, yields a sensory experience that resists allegorical or moralizing interpretations.30 Disregarding their own attributes — though, in Saturn’s case, a little eros tries to steal his scythe — the deities appear earthy and elegiac rather than transcendent and divine. They succumb to sensual desire as the feast celebrates peace and prosperity, allowing the various arts to flourish. The way in which the gods play out the narrative of music making and seduction around the glimmering tablecloth — which also serves as a lustrous net to catch the seafood — finds an analogy with what Ronsard called the fabuleux manteau (‘fabulous mantle’). This poetic device, which Ronsard states he learned from Jean Dorat, is not solely a decorative surface or veil — a cloak of fable — that disguises verité (‘truth’).31 Instead, Ronsard frequently uses textiles and other decorative motifs — highly ornamental vestments, jewellery, musical instruments, and baskets either fashioned by the gods or adorning their person — in his mythological verse to display his literary artifice. In imitation of ancient Greek and Latin ekphrases, he vividly describes these objects’ various textures, shifting patterns, and dazzling surface effects, many with pictorial motifs and complex narratives concerning the gods’ amorous activities and their supernatural births.32 Perhaps the most famous of these ekphrases are Neptune’s cloak in Le Ravissement de Cephale (verses 133–47) and Leda’s basket in La Defloration de Lede (verses 70–116), two odes first published in 1550. The poet relishes the imagery of the latter object, lingering over vignettes with Aurora, Apollo, and playful satyrs, as well as one depicting a shepherd who is so enthralled by a snail climbing to the top of a lily in a meadow that he fails to notice the wolf about to terrorize his flock. Ronsard’s expressive energies and pictorial diction capture the reader’s attention and compete with the profuse artistic decorations that embellished the court palace of Fontainebleau.33 Cave defines this manner of writing as a ‘“mythological style” which appears to be wholly ornamental, sensuous or picturesque, even gratuitous, perhaps’.34 By emphasizing natural beauty, material richness, and exquisite facture, Ronsard bypasses allegory and celebrates the nature of poetic creation and artistic production — its colours, abundance, energy, and generative aspects.35 For an alternative, allegorical reading of Floris’s mythological imagery, including the paintings discussed in this essay, see Fiona Healy, ‘Bedrooms and Banquets: Mythology in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting’, in Concept, Design, and Execution in Flemish Painting (1550–1700), ed.  by Hans Vlieghe, Arnout Balis, and Van de Velde (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp. 73–96, esp. pp. 83–90. Healy tends to see Floris’s banquet imagery in terms of the dangers and consequences of complacency and carnal desire in the midst of the potential threat of war. While Floris’s work may have carried a moral or political charge for viewers, my aim is to provide a different possibility for the reception of his mythological vocabulary. 31 See Ronsard’s Hynne de l’Autonne (À Claude de l’Aubespine), first published in 1563, in Ronsard, Selected Poems, pp. 165–75 (p. 168), verses 77–82. 32 See Cave, ‘Ronsard’s Mythological Universe’, pp. 160–61. 33 For the connection between Ronsard’s poetry and the visual arts, see Cave, ‘Ronsard’s Mythological Universe’, pp. 161– 65; Philip Ford, ‘Ronsard’s Erotic Diptych: Le Ravissement de Cephale and La Defloration de Lede’, French Studies, 47 (1993), 385–403; Ford, Ronsard’s ‘Hymnes’, pp. 31–45; and, most recently, Margaret M. McGowan, ‘Ronsard and the Visual Arts: A Study in Poetic Creativity’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 78 (2015), 173–205. 34 Cave, ‘Ronsard’s Mythological Universe’, p. 161. 35 Cave, ‘Ronsard’s Mythological Universe’, pp. 184–85, argues that Ronsard’s mythological poetry communicates largely beyond the moral and allegorical. For various interpretive models regarding myth in French poetry, see also Guy Demerson, La Mythologie classique dans l’oeuvre lyrique de la ‘Pléiade’ (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1972); and Ford, Ronsard’s ‘Hymnes’. Tianna Uchacz’s ‘Mars, Venus, and Vulcan: Equivocal Erotics and Art in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp’ in this volume discusses how the visual arts in Antwerp of the mid-sixteenth century often promoted sensuality and desire, drawing parallels between classical descriptions of divine workmanship and Renaissance artifice, and complicating defensive, moralizing interpretations of Venus and Mars’s sexual exploits. 30

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Floris’s brush and Ronsard’s pen share fundamental trajectories in their respective use of mythology: both artist and poet convert ancient fable into a wealth of diversity and artifice, and both employ the power of art as an instrument of seduction. As in Floris’s painting, the gods in Ronsard’s poetry eschew divine decorum as they coerce their objects of desire. La Defloration de Lede describes Jupiter as filled with an ‘amoureuse rage’ (‘passionate rage’) and as ‘porté de son desir’ (‘driven by his desire’): adorned with a chain wrought of gleaming gold bands and iridescent enamel, the god swoops down from heaven in the form of a swan to ravish Leda.36 Correspondingly, certain gods in Floris’s Graz painting forcibly encourage their female companions to imbibe while other couples seem to share mutual sexual pleasure. Music complements the natural setting and the delicious fare to stimulate the deities’ amorous behaviour. The same holds true for La Lyre, a later poem from 1569 that Ronsard devoted to this instrument. The poet describes a lyre’s decorative inlay in which Apollo appears at the feast of the gods, harmonizing the age-old discord between Pallas and Neptune with music and absorbing tensions while singing about his own love for the mortal king Admetus (verses 273–81). Art — painting, poetry, and music — prevails as love dominates even in its more transgressive forms. Viewers of Floris’s painting would readily have drawn an analogy between his emphasis on kissing among the gods and the contemporary kiss poems composed by Neo-Latin and vernacular poets. The Dutch-born Neo-Latin poet Janus Secundus (1511–36) was a central figure in the revival of the kiss poem during the Renaissance. His Basia (1539; 1541) consists of nineteen poems in various metres, in which the poet explores sensual and emotional themes surrounding the kiss. Modelled after Catullus, the Basia steer readers away from moral or allegorical messages and instead flaunt the power of poetry in their erotic and often physically aggressive descriptions of kissing. In essence, Secundus promotes transgressive and lascivious verse as a legitimate form of poetic invention.37 His poems, which feature metaphors of nature and food and drink, as well as numerous invocations of the gods, became the model for kiss poems by Marot, Ronsard, and many other French poets. Notably, a poem from Ronsard’s Les Amours de Cassandre, first published in 1552, describes the poet’s dream of a passionate kiss with his lover, one that relates to the conduct of the gods in Floris’s painting: Panchant sous moy son bel ivoyre blanc, Et m’y tirant sa langue fretillarde, Me baizottoit d’une lévre mignarde, Bouche sur bouche, et le flanc sus le flanc. Que de coral, que de liz, que de roses, Ce me sembloit à pleines mains descloses Tastay-je lors entre deux maniments? Leaning toward me with her lovely white ivory, and offering me her flickering tongue, she kissed me repeatedly with her dainty lips, mouth upon mouth, and body upon body. How much coral, how many lilies, how many roses, did I seem to fondle then with two caresses of my fully opened hands!38 36 37 38

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Ronsard, ‘La Defloration de Lede’, Selected Poems, pp. 83–93 (pp. 84–86), verses 25–64. See David Price, ‘The Poetics of License in Janus Secundus’s Basia’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 23 (1992), 289–301. Ronsard, ‘Les Amours de Cassandre’, Selected Poems, p. 23, poem 192, verses 5–11.

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Fig. 3: Sodoma, Marriage of Alexander and Roxana, fresco, c. 1517. Villa Farnesina, Rome. Photo: © Kathleen Cohen. WorldImages.

While paralleling the ornamental and seductive nature of French verse, Floris’s painting also combines pictorial sensuality with irony. For example, the mischievous eros wearing Mars’s armour and holding his sword in the right-hand corner recalls Lucian’s spirited description of Aëtion’s Marriage of Alexander and Roxana. In describing the ancient painting in detail, Lucian praised certain ornaments of invention — smaller episodes nested in the main composition — for instance the erotes playing among the weapons of Alexander. Lucian argues that such details are not needless triviality and a waste of artistic labour, but that instead they signal how Alexander was equally renowned for his military and sexual prowess.39 Lucian’s writings fuelled the rich vein of satire in Renaissance humanism throughout Europe, and Floris’s patrons, who included such sophisticated individuals as Jongelinck, Granvelle, and Jean Noirot, master of the Antwerp mint, would have recognized and appreciated this elevated classical reference. As the gods demonstrate their sexual proficiency, the erotes fly teasingly above the scene in the garden canopy, having pinched their abandoned attributes. In this latter detail, Floris imitated Sodoma’s grand fresco, the Marriage of Alexander and Roxana (c. 1517), in the Villa Farnesina, Rome (Figure  3), which is based on a much-copied drawing by Raphael and follows Lucian’s text in showing some erotes playing with Alexander’s armour while others flutter above the couple’s elegant bedchamber, holding up the canopy and shooting arrows of love.40 Lucian, Herodotus or Aëtion, trans. by K. Kilburn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), Chapter 6. For the motif of erotes playing with armour, see Jan L. De Jong, ‘Ovidian Fantasies: Pictorial Variations on the Story of Mars, Venus, and Vulcan’, in Die Rezeption der ‘Metamorphosen’ des Ovid in der Neuzeit: Der Antike Mythos in Text und Bild, ed. by Hermann Walter and Hans-Jürgen Horn (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1995), pp. 161–71; and Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 107–46. 40 Raphael’s drawing is now in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna. 39

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Fig. 4: Frans Floris, Feast of the Gods, oil on panel, 1550. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. Photo: © Kathleen Cohen. WorldImages.

The Graz Feast of the Gods reveals how Floris tends to de-heroicize and humanize the Olympian gods. In an earlier version of the subject, an oil painting on panel now in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, signed and dated ‘FF. IV. ET F. 1550’, Floris depicts an extravagant banquet with Mars at its centre, the god seated on his breastplate and amusingly seen from behind (Figure 4).41 Mars is completely stripped of his armour: mighty in war — armipotens, as Lucretius labels him in his De rerum natura — he is rendered impotent ‘vulnere amoris’ (‘by the wound of love’).42 Once again, Mercury pipes from two flutes and love is the generative force behind the celebratory imagery. It is well known that Floris popularized feast imagery loosely based on ancient descriptions of mythological banquets in the city of Antwerp.43 Who commissioned the Antwerp painting is uncertain, but the work may relate to the Banquet of the Gods Floris painted for Antwerp’s Town Hall, perhaps an unprecedented use of the subject in a civic context. The Town Hall painting, first mentioned in 1571, On this painting, see Van de Velde, Frans Floris, i, pp. 185–86. Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. by W.  H.  D. Rouse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), i, verses 33–34. 43 For example, the feast to Bacchus described in Ovid’s Fasti, i, verses 393–440; the wedding banquets for Peleus and Thetis in Catullus’s Carmen 64; and Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius’s Golden Ass, vi, Chapter 24. See David Rijser, ‘After the Flood: Luxurious Antwerp and Antiquity’, in Understanding Art in Antwerp, pp. 25–35, on the assimilation of ancient and Renaissance literary and artistic references in Floris’s painting. On the popularity of the banquet theme in Netherlandish art, see Eric J. Sluijter, ‘Depiction of Mythological Themes’, in Gods, Saints, and Heroes: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt (Washington, DC: Trustees of the National Gallery of Art, 1980), pp. 55–64 (p. 60); Cheney, ‘The Oyster in Dutch Genre Paintings’, pp. 135–41; and Healy, ‘Bedrooms and Banquets’, pp. 87–90. 41 42

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Fig. 5: Frans Floris, Feast of the Sea Gods, oil on panel, 1561. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Photo: Ethan Matt Kavaler.

is now lost, although it seems to have inspired other versions.44 Floris’s oil painting on panel of the Feast of the Sea Gods (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), signed and dated ‘FF. IV. ET FA. 1561’, can be identified as the one in Jongelinck’s collection (Figure 5).45 By March 1551, Jongelinck was appointed the toll-collector for Zeeland: the toll for which he was responsible was imposed on goods brought into the Netherlands by boat — in 1560 it yielded a lucrative annual rent of 9000 guilders.46 Here the sea gods not only enjoy but also personify the bounties of the sea, which can be read as an allegory of the wealth and pleasure Zeeland and Antwerp offered Jongelinck. But this interpretation is perhaps too simplistic for such profuse imagery of lustful deities. The painting more readily makes manifest the notion of natural abundance and reproduction, with the sea gods appearing as propagative and sustaining sources in life, literature, and art.47 In Floris’s different versions of the Feast of the Gods, Venus’s role is Lucretian: she appears as Venus genetrix and alma — the generative and nourishing goddess invoked in the opening lines of the De rerum natura.48 Venus is also the sensual force that appeases Mars and fills the gods with desire. Ronsard, along with many other French and Italian Renaissance poets, frequently imitated Lucretius’s invocation to Venus to subdue Mars and echoed the Roman poet’s illustrations of the madness of desire. In these literary and artistic Lucretian representations, love and fertility dispose of external threats and lead to lyric and pictorial profusion. See Van de Velde, Frans Floris, i, p. 469, docs. 72, 73; and Healy, ‘Bedrooms and Banquets’, pp. 88, 95 n. 69. As suggested by Van de Velde, Frans Floris, i, pp. 277–79; and Healy, ‘Bedrooms and Banquets’, p. 95 n. 69. See Iain Buchanan, ‘The Collection of Niclaes Jongelinck: I. “Bacchus and the Planets” by Jacques Jongelinck’, The Burlington Magazine, 132 (1990), 102–13 (p. 103). 47 For related themes in French art, see Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). 48 Lucretius, De rerum natura, I, verses 1–2. For the importance of Lucretius to Renaissance visual arts, see, among other studies, Campbell, ‘Giorgione’s Tempest, Studiolo Culture, and the Renaissance Lucretius’, Renaissance Quarterly, 56 (2003), 299–332; Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love, pp. 9, 24, 30, 32–33, 36–37, 40–42, 46–47, 50–52; Alison Brown, ‘Lucretius and the Epicureans in the Social and Political Context of Renaissance Florence’, I Tatti Studies, 9 (2001), 11–62; and Fiorenza, Dosso Dossi, pp. 93–94. 44 45 46

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Fig. 6: Frans Floris, Forge of Vulcan, oil on panel, early 1560s. Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Photo: ©­ Kathleen Cohen. WorldImages.

Venus appears as a creative power in Floris’s Forge of Vulcan (Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), an oil painting on panel that dates from the early 1560s (Figure  6).49 Although speculation continues as to the original patron of this work, the painting nevertheless offers a kind of manifesto of Floris’s artifice and pictorial technique. Its imagery goes to the heart of Virgil’s narrative in the eighth book of the Aeneid, in which Venus induces Vulcan to forge arms for her mortal son Aeneas. Vulcan interrupts the work of his smiths, who had been busily fashioning Jupiter’s thunderbolts and Mars’s chariot, and ‘aegidaque horriferam, turbatae Palladis arma,  | certatim squamis serpentum auroque polibant   | conexosque anguis ipsamque in pectore divae   | Gorgona desecto vertentem lumina collo’ (‘eagerly with golden scales of serpents were burnishing the awful aegis, armour of wrathful Pallas, the interwoven snakes, and on the breast of the goddess the Gorgon herself, with neck severed and eyes revolving’).50 Floris represents visually the highly descriptive nature of Virgil’s poetic language in the details surrounding Vulcan and his helpers. We see the products of the smiths’ industry, weaponry that also serves to display Floris’s own powers of mimesis, his ability to contrast various materials, and to render 49 Van de Velde, Frans Floris, i, pp.  275–76. Maarten van Heemskerck’s canvas of Venus and Cupid in Vulcan’s Forge, painted in Italy in 1536 and engraved by Cornelis Bos in 1546, undoubtedly served as a model for Floris. See Ilja M. Veldman, Maarten van Heemskerck and Dutch Humanism in the Sixteenth Century, trans. by Michael Hoyle (Maarssen: Gary Schwartz, 1977), pp. 21–42. Healy, ‘Bedrooms and Banquets’, p. 86, states that Floris’s picture carries an ‘unmistakable marital tone’. 50 Virgil, Aeneid, trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. by G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), viii, verses 435–38.

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reflections and highlights on highly polished armour. The painting thus displays the transformative powers of the visual arts and competes with Virgil’s artful diction. Floris’s Berlin painting draws further on the personifications decorating the façade of his house in its emphasis on the qualities of diligentia, usus, labor, experientia, and industria at the forge — qualities that can be equated to the artist’s own bravura technique and to his speed in execution. Floris captures, for instance, the roaring flashes of fire described in Virgil’s text as the smiths beat metal with their hammers. Karel van Mander, a pupil of De Heere, admired such painterly virtuosity and noted in his Schilder-boeck (1604) Floris’s fame for veerdicheyt (rapidity) and so groote veerdicheyt (great speed of working).51 As Koenraad Jonckheere has pointed out, Floris, in contrast to his Antwerp colleague Willem Key (1516–68), preferred to demonstrate his artifice with fervid brushwork, rather than to conceal it, especially in his secular subjects.52 To conclude, while Floris’s invention resonates with ancient poetic description, it also interacts with the art and literature of his contemporaries. It is important to reconsider the issues of both style and the vernacular. In the Berlin painting, Venus appears as a Fontainebleau beauty: her creamy white skin and slender, slightly elongated features correspond closely to the figures decorating the royal residence. Beginning in the 1530s, Italian artists Rosso Fiorentino and Francesco Primaticcio produced a highly refined style at the French court, seeking a new ideal of feminine beauty based on a mix of French and Italian vernacular models.53 Floris can be seen as responding to such ideals and associating the goddess’s allure with his own sensual artifice. It was most likely these characteristics of Floris’s eloquence that compelled De Heere to refer to his pictorial style in terms of the richness and sweetness of French lyric poetry.54 With an urban public becoming increasingly aware of the rising status of French art and poetry, De Heere responded with his own poetic theory and exemplary refined verse in Den Hof en Boomgaerd der Poësien, in which he presented Floris’s art as a compelling example of an emerging, highly expressive, and ornamental visual aesthetic that was bound to excite the viewer’s imagination.

Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the first edition of the Schilderboeck (1603–04), 6 vols, trans. by Hessel Miedema (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1994), i, pp. 213–33 (pp. 224–25). 52 Koenraad Jonckheere, Willem Key (1516–1568): Portrait of a Humanist Painter (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), p. 29. 53 See Fiorenza, ‘Penelope’s Web: Francesco Primaticcio’s Epic Revision at Fontainebleau’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59 (2006), 795–827. 54 Stylistic affinities between Floris’s art and the School of Fontainebleau have long been observed (most recently by Wouk, The New Hollstein) but the connection between Floris’s art and French poetry merits further study, especially in light of De Heere’s text. 51

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Mars, Venus, and Vulcan Equivocal Erotics and Art in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp* Tianna Helena Uchacz The Making and Knowing Project Columbia University

Around the middle of the sixteenth century, the leading painters in the Low Countries took a sudden interest in the story of Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, an unprecedented subject in Netherlandish painting. From about 1545 to 1561, Maerten van Heemskerck, Frans Floris, Willem Key, and Vincent Sellaer produced no fewer than eleven distinct compositions of this mythological tale; six of these paintings are extant or known through photographs, and a further five are documented.1 Netherlandish painters consistently represented a moment from the story that invited judgement — the revelation of

I thank Karolien De Clippel and Utrecht University for granting me a Short Stay Fellowship to pursue research on this topic. I am grateful to Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure van Bruaene for welcoming my contribution to the Netherlandish Culture conference in Toronto and to the present volume. Kavaler’s generosity and guidance have been indispensable to the development of my work. 1 The six paintings extant or known from photographs are as follows: 1) Maerten van Heemskerck, c.  1545, oil on panel, 96  ×  99 cm (cut down, original dimensions uncertain), Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. 2) Frans Floris, 1547, oil on panel, 150 × 198 cm, lost, formerly Berlin. 3) Willem Key, c. 1550–55, oil on panel, 145 × 210 cm, Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum. 4) Vincent Sellaer, c. 1550–60, oil on panel, 114 × 145 cm, Antwerp, Rubenshuis. 5) Frans Floris, c. 1560, oil on panel, 93 × 115 (cut down, original dimensions uncertain), Sibiu, Brukenthal Museum. 6) Maerten van Heemskerck, 1561, oil on canvas transferred from panel, 62  ×  98.5 cm, Saint Petersburg, Pavlovsk Palace. The five documented works, of which no reliable reproductions survive, are as follows: 1) Maerten van Heemskerck Mars and Venus and All the Gods. Documented in the collection of J. B. Borrekens of Antwerp in 1668. See Rainald Grosshans, Maerten van Heemskerck: die Gemälde (Berlin: Boettcher, 1980), pp. 253–54, no. V15. 2) Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan in the Presence of the Gods, panel, 155 × 252 cm. Formerly in the collection of the Palatine Electors in Düsseldorf, known through a print in a catalogue raisonné published in 1778, Grosshans, Maerten van Heemskerck, p. 255, no. V22. Jefferson Harrison claims that this work is identical to the Borrekens painting. See Jefferson Cabell Harrison, ‘The Paintings of Maerten van Heemskerck: a Catalogue Raisonne’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Virginia, 1987), p. 591. 3) Adultery of Mars and Venus, 1553. A prize in the Middleburg lottery held that year. See Grosshans, Maerten van Heemskerck, p. 259, no. V47. 4) Frans Floris Mars, Venus, and Cupid Lying Together, the Other Gods Watching Them, canvas, approx. 152 × 138 cm. See Carl Van de Velde, Frans Floris (1519/20–1570): Leven en werken, 2 vols (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1975), i, pp. 492–94, doc. 108, no. 79. 5) Mars and Venus Lying Together, the Other Gods Watching and Catching Them in the Net, approx. 193 × 304 cm. See Van de Velde, i, pp. 492–94, doc. 108, no. 83. For a workshop copy after Willem Key’s Braunschweig composition in the Lightner Museum in Florida, see Koenraad Jonckheere, Willem Key (1516–1568): Portrait of a Humanist Painter, trans. by Katy Kist and Jennifer Kilian, Pictura Nova 12 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 182–83, no. A109. Jonckheere rejects the attribution to Key of an untraced version for sale by J. Fiévez in December 1911. See Jonckheere, Willem Key, p. 255, no. D66. The panel in question appears to be identical to the Sellaer painting in Antwerp. See Tableaux anciens, 18 December 1911 (Brussels: Galerie Fievez, 1911), lot 166, fig. 166. The Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie has photos of two similar works deriving from Floris’s version of 1547: one was auctioned in Berlin, 24 January 1934, lot 82, and the other is labelled as ‘Naumann Collection’. Van de Velde considers these identical, and together they account for one of the two copies he lists of the Floris painting. The other is in Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, inv. no. 182. See Van de Velde, Frans Floris, i, p. 153, no. S2. *

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 245-267. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114011

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the adulterous couple caught in flagrante — yet they nurtured a moral ambiguity in the paintings calculated to appeal to the expectations of the educated classes. Artists complicated the potential responses to these works by cultivating points of contact with larger social concerns related to Venus’s infidelity and Vulcan’s reaction to it, as well as with earlier vernacular themes like the Unequal Couple. The regulation of erotic desire, the moral authority of classical texts, and the general didactic role of painting are all salient here. Moreover, the narrative importance of Vulcan’s artfully crafted net invited consideration of literary and artistic issues, particularly the idea of the artist as captor of beauty, the competition with antiquity, and the notion of art as deception. The dense cluster of documented and surviving paintings on this theme and the visual discourse among them show how painters addressed these various concerns while developing their respective artistic brands. In the years around 1550, the production of paintings of Mars and Venus Surprised was concentrated in Antwerp, where booming trade and commerce stimulated considerable demand for art and other luxury goods. Antwerp’s wealthy and educated inhabitants had begun to collect mythological paintings, sometimes referred to quasi-generically as ‘poeteryen’. These works appealed to a patron’s familiarity with classical poetic texts and contemporary vernacular poetry; as Giancarlo Fiorenza argues elsewhere in this volume, French lyric and its ancient precedents provided the critical terms and theoretical framework by which to characterize and promote the innovative subject matter and ornamental style of Floris and his contemporaries. Mythological paintings also satisfied the growing taste for the antico-Italianate nude, and their erotic quality made them all the more desirable; the scene of Mars and Venus caught in an illicit act and revealed to a throng of idealized nude and half-nude gods and goddesses was doubtless appreciated, in part, for its titillating qualities.2 This particular narrative event was a key moment in the larger story of Mars and Venus’s affair, which was recounted most fully in Homer’s Odyssey (viii. 266–366) and in

Probate inventories can help suggest the relative prominence of paintings of Mars and Venus Surprised in sixteenthcentury collections, but there are difficulties. Images of or including Venus eclipsed all other categories of mythological painting in popularity. Inventory entries such as ‘Venus’, ‘Venus and Cupid’, or ‘Venus and Mars’ may or may not correspond to the subject; such descriptors were likely shorthand for ‘titillating female nude’. In Antwerp, of the 114 mythological paintings Greet Stappaerts catalogues before 1600, ‘Mars and Venus (and Cupid)’ are recorded a total of six times, though the couple could also be included among the twenty-eight paintings referred to as ‘poeterye’. See Greet Stappaerts, ‘Bijdrage tot de studie van schilderijen in privé-bezit te Antwerpen in de zestiende eeuw’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Brussels: Vrije Universiteit, 1988). The first Antwerp inventory record likely corresponding to the subject dates from 1607 (a terminus ante quem for the production of the work): Vulcanus ende andere Goden (‘Vulcan and the Other Gods’). See Erik Duverger, Antwerpse kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw (Brussels: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, 1984), i, pp.  168–69, inv. no.  84. Two well-known examples of private collections with significant numbers of mythological works were those of Niclaes Jonghelinck, which included Floris’s Labours of Hercules series, and Jean Noirot, which included at least four mythological narratives. See Iain Buchanan, ‘The Collection of Niclaes Jongelinck: II. The “Months” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’, The Burlington Magazine, 132 (1990), 541–50; and Luc Smolderen, ‘Tableaux de Jérôme Bosch, de Pierre Bruegel l’Ancien et de Frans Floris dispersés en vente publique à la Monnaie d’Anvers en 1572’, Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art, 64  (1995), 33–41. For the establishment of Antwerp’s Schilderspand (or ‘painters’ gallery’) in 1540 and its potential impact on the production of large-scale mythological nudes, see Jonckheere, ‘Nudity on the Market: Some Thoughts on the Market and Innovations in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp’, in Aemulatio: Imitation, Emulation and Invention in Netherlandish Art from 1500 to 1800: Essays in Honor of Eric Jan Sluijter, ed. by Anton W. A. Boschloo and others (Zwolle: Waanders, 2011), pp. 25–36. For the term poeterye and its variants (e.g., poëterijen) in seventeenth-century literature and art writing, see Eric Jan Sluijter, De ‘heydensche fabulen’ in de schilderkunst van de Gouden Eeuw. Schilderijen met verhalende onderwerpen uit de klassieke mytholoige in de noordelijke Nederlanden, circa 1590–1670 (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2000), pp. 14–15.

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Fig. 1: Maerten van Heemskerck, Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, c. 1545, oil on panel, 96 × 99 cm (cut down, original dimensions uncertain). Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses (iv. 171–89).3 While the moment of revelation and judgement of the entrapped lovers seems to have appealed largely to Antwerp painters and their patrons, examples were also produced in Haarlem and Mechelen (and later in Utrecht); Maerten van Heemskerck’s version of c. 1545 is the first known Netherlandish painting devoted to the subject (Figure 1).4 For a discussion of the many editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses issued in the sixteenth century, see Sluijter, De ‘heydensche fabulen’, pp. 170–79. For a compilation of classical, medieval, and Renaissance sources for the myth as well as a bibliography, see ‘ICONOS: Marte, Venere e Vulcano’, ICONOS: Cattedra di Iconografia e Iconologia del Dipartimento di Storia dell’Arte della Facoltà di Scienze Umanistiche dell’Università di Roma ‘La Sapienza’ http://iconos.it/index.php?id=2997 [accessed 15 February 2014]. 4 Ilja Veldman dates the panel between 1540 and 1545, Grosshans c. 1540, and Harrison c. 1545. See Veldman, Maarten van Heemskerck and Dutch Humanism in the Sixteenth Century (Maarssen: Schwartz, 1977), p.  36; Grosshans, Maerten van Heemskerck, pp. 124–25; and Harrison, ‘The Paintings’, p. 589. Heemskerck’s drawing of 1538 in the British Museum, Ruins with Vulcan’s Forge, is the artist’s first known engagement with the subject. For the Vienna panel’s history and its part in the so-called ‘Vulcan Triptych’, see Veldman, Maarten van Heemskerck, pp. 19–42. The subject had appeared in a small ornamental roundel in Gossart’s Venus and Amor of 1521 (oil on panel, 41.5 × 30 cm, Brussels, Musées Royaux des BeauxArts, inv. no. 6611). 3

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Curiously, few Italian or French paintings from this period appear to have focused on the same narrative moment.5 In the Low Countries, however, the subject remained of some interest to even the next generation of artists, including Anthonis Blocklandt, Jacob de Backer, Hendrik Goltzius, and Joachim Wtewael, some of whom had personal connections to Floris and to Heemskerck; the subject would fall out of fashion by the early seventeenth century.6 In other words, paintings of Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan were largely specific to the Low Countries of the mid-sixteenth century. French and Italian painters had never favoured the narrative moment of the revelation of the captured lovers, which was typically reserved for other media. It appeared in tapestry, majolica, manuscript illumination, bronze relief, wooden relief, drawing, and print by artists working in Venice, Rome, Bologna, and Fontainebleau; painting, however, was seldom chosen to represent this event.7 French and Italian painters preferred the more erotic and focused scene of Mars and Venus embracing; this moment was also represented by Netherlandish painters — it seems the amorous subject had cross-cultural appeal and legitimacy as a stand-alone image.8 When Italian painters did address the larger mythological tale, they made significant departures from the established story that effectively created new narratives. For example, Tintoretto’s Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan (c.  1555) shows Vulcan inspecting Venus and her bedding with suspicion, while Mars hides under the bed, hoping to escape unnoticed.9 Similarly, Lambert Sustris, a Netherlander working in Venice, painted a variation on the story in which Mars comes courting to the home of Venus and Vulcan while the married couple is engaged in an amorous act.10 As Jan de Jong Paris Bordone’s Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, c.  1555, oil on canvas, 168  ×  198 cm, on loan to Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, represents the relevant theme and belongs to the same Iconclass category as the Netherlandish examples (92B4233), but it depicts a different narrative moment. A Vulcan qui surprend Mars et Venus by Dosso Dossi is recorded in the collection of Cardinal Richelieu in 1643, but it remains untraced. See Getty Provenance Index® databases, J. Paul Getty Trust; Burton Fredericksen, ‘Collecting Dosso: The Trial of Dosso’s Paintings from the Late Sixteenth Century Onward’, in Dosso’s Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Luisa Ciammitti, Steven F. Ostrow, and Salvatore Settis (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998), pp. 370–97 (p. 387). 6 Blocklandt, c. 1575, drawing, Schwerin, Staatliches Museum, inv. no. 1202; De Backer, oil on canvas, 180 × 146 cm, Aachen, Suermont-Ludwig-Museum, inv. no. GK 345; Goltzius, 1585, drawing, 41.6  ×  31.3 cm, Malibu, J.  Paul Getty Museum, inv. no. 84.GG.810; Goltzius, 1585, engraving, 42 × 31 cm; Wtewael, drawing, 20.3 × 15.4 cm, Europe, private collection; Wtewael, c. 1601, drawing, 21.8 × 16.7 cm, Florence, Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, inv. no. 9587 Santorelli; Wtewael, 1601, oil on copper, 21 × 15.5 cm, The Hague, Mauritshuis, inv. no. 223; and Wtewael, c. 1606–10, oil on copper, 20.25 × 15.5 cm, Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum, inv. no. 83.PC.274. 7 Peruzzi’s designs for the monochrome frescoes on the exterior of the Villa Farnesina included a version of the scene. See Anka Ziefer, ‘Marte e Venere sorpresi da Vulcano: la fortuna iconografica di un affresco perduto di Baldassarre Peruzzi per la Villa Farnesina a Roma’, in Some Degree of Happiness: Studi di storia dell’architettura in onore di Howard Burns, ed. by Maria Beltramini and Caroline Elam (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2010), pp. 207–32. A fresco c. 1540 from the circle of Perino del Vaga in the Palazzo Balami-Galitzin also shows the relevant narrative moment. See Claudia Cieri Via, L’arte delle metamorfosi: decorazioni mitologiche nel Cinquecento (Roma: Lithos, 2003), pp. 274–75. For the theme in sixteenth-century Venice, see Claudia Cieri Via, ‘Venere, Vulcano e Marte: un’allegoria mitologica nella cultura veneta del Cinquecento’, in Die Allegorese des antiken Mythos, ed. by Hans-Jürgen Horn and Hermann Walter, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 75 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), pp. 351–94. For tapestries, see Ella S. Siple, ‘A Flemish Set of Venus and Vulcan Tapestries, I: Their Origin and Design’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 73 (1938), 212–21; and Siple, ‘A Flemish Set of Venus and Vulcan Tapestries, II: Their Influence on English Tapestry Design’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 74 (1939), 268–79. For examples of majolica, illumination, bronze plaques, drawings, prints, and paintings predominantly by Italian and French artists, see ‘ICONOS: Marte, Venere e Vulcano: Immagini’, ICONOS: Cattedra di Iconografia e Iconologia del Dipartimento di Storia dell’Arte della Facoltà di Scienze Umanistiche dell’Università di Roma ‘La Sapienza’ http://iconos.it/ index.php?id=3001 [accessed 15 February 2014]. 8 Surviving versions of Mars and Venus Embracing vary in quality more than those of Mars and Venus Surprised. For example, see Jonckheere, Willem Key, pp.  177–78, A96. See also the Mars and Venus in Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum catalogued as style of Floris, inv. no. NM 6835. 9 Oil on canvas, 135 × 198 cm., Munich, Alte Pinakothek, inv. no. 9257. 10 Schleißheim, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, inv. no. 2408. 5

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has pointed out, such re-imaginings of classical myths were intentional and met with mixed reception. The liberties that Titian thought appropriate to take with the story of Venus and Adonis, for instance, were criticized sharply by Raphael Borghini in 1585, whereas a generation earlier they were thought by Lodovico Dolce to indicate the artist’s great talent and inventiveness.11 Unlike their more experimental Italian counterparts, the leading Netherlandish painters remained fixated upon a pivotal moment in the classical version of the story, allowing their works to be in dialogue with one another and implying their shared intellectual and artistic circles. Though Antwerp was the centre of commercial and artistic trade in the Low Countries, painters of and audiences for Mars and Venus Surprised were also found outside the Brabantine metropolis. Maerten van Heemskerck lived and worked in Haarlem and was connected to a far-reaching network of intellectuals, artists, and high-ranking citizens, including Jan van Zuren, Cornelis Musius, Petrus van Opmeer, Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert, and Hadrianus Junius.12 Frans Floris and Willem Key, though established in Antwerp, had both spent formative time in Liège studying at Lambert Lombard’s Italian-styled academy of art. Lombard’s intellectual pursuits were broad, ambitious, and influential, and his circle of contacts included eminent figures such as Abraham Ortelius, Laevinus Torrentius, Stephanus Pighius, Hubert Goltzius, and Domenicus Lampsonius.13 Intellectuals and artists with pronounced humanist interests like those in the networks of Heemskerck and Lombard were often engaged in the translation and interpretation of classical texts and antiquities. These individuals supported the introduction of novel classical subjects in painting as well as in print. In Antwerp, Hieronymus Cock published numerous innovative prints after designs by Heemskerck, Lombard, and Frans Floris as well as compositions that married an interest in vernacular artistic traditions to an increasingly fashionable antico-Italianate idiom.14 Haarlem, Liège, and Mechelen (where Vincent Sellaer worked) were significant centres of culture and learning; nevertheless, it is useful to consider Heemskerck, Floris, Key, and Sellaer as part of an extended artistic circle centred in Antwerp. This extended Antwerp artistic circle was further connected by confraternal networks, the most important of which were the local rederijkerskamers (‘chambers of rhetoric’), which likewise dealt with classical and traditional themes and often counted local artists amongst their membership.15 While regional competitions between rederijkerskamers were an important opportunity for cultural exchange, personal connections between individuals ensured a more regular flow.16 The remarkable overlap between the thematic content of the dramatic and visual arts in the sixteenth century greatly depended on the social networks Jan L. De Jong, ‘Ovidian Fantasies: Pictorial Variations on the Story of Mars, Venus and Vulcan’, in Die Rezeption der ‘Metamorphosen’ des Ovid in der Neuzeit: der antike Mythos in Text und Bild: internationales Symposium der Werner ReimersStiftung, Bad Homburg v.d. H., 22. bis 25. April 1991, ed. by Walter and Horn, Ikonographische Repertorien zur Rezeption des antiken Mythos in Europa: i (Berlin: Mann, 1995), pp. 161–72 (pp. 170–71). 12 Veldman, Maarten van Heemskerck, passim. 13 Edward H. Wouk, ‘Reclaiming the Antiquities of Gaul: Lambert Lombard and the History of Northern Art’, Simiolus, 36 (2012), 35–65. 14 Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print, ed. by Joris Van Grieken, Ger Luijten, and Jan Van der Stock (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2013), pp. 89–123, 149–89. 15 This was particularly true in Antwerp, where the rederijkerskamer known as De Violieren (‘The Gillyflower’) was closely associated with the Guild of Saint Luke, to which the painters and, from 1557–58, the printers belonged. Walter S. Gibson, ‘Artists and Rederijkers in the Age of Bruegel’, The Art Bulletin, 63 (1981), 426–46. 16 Van Bruaene, ‘“A Wonderfull Tryumfe, for the Wynnyng of a Pryse”: Guilds, Ritual, Theater, and the Urban Network in the Southern Low Countries, ca. 1450–1650’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59 (2006), 374–405. 11

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uniting rederijkers (‘rhetoricians’) to artists.17 Particularly relevant for the paintings of Mars and Venus Surprised is the 1551 transcription by Amsterdam rederijker Reijer Gheurtsz. of the play Hue Mars en Venus tsaemen bueleerden (‘How Mars and Venus Dallied Together’).18 This play was composed around 1500 by the Brussels rederijker and official city poet Jan Smeken, and Gheurtz appears to have acquired a copy for his transcription from the dean of the Antwerp chamber De Olijftak, Peter Corneliszoon van Dalem.19 The accessibility of the text in Antwerp at precisely the time that Cornelis van Ghistele and Willem van Haecht, factors of Antwerp’s De Goudbloem and De Violieren respectively, were composing plays inspired by mythological and historical narratives and translating the comedies of Terence, exemplifies the vogue for classical themes around mid-century. The transcription of Hue Mars en Venus tsaemen bueleerden for a Northern Netherlandish milieu suggests something of the interurban reach of the rederijkerskamers as a conduit for the spread of ideas. It also attests to the general interest in the theme of Mars and Venus Surprised at this time.20 The Unequal Couple Paintings of Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan tell a story of vigilante justice enacted by a lame, cuckolded husband against his much younger wife and her virile lover. It is tempting to believe that the currency of the mythological theme was related to contemporary concerns in Netherlandish society around adultery and its foil, legitimate (Christian) marriage.21 The story of Mars and Venus’s affair and its eventual discovery accommodated distinct yet overlapping views of sixteenth-century marital norms as well as an evolving pictorial tradition. The virtuous conduct of women was a subject of particular interest at this time, and it was often addressed by way of conduct manuals and treatises on education and marriage. The most influential of these, Juan Luis Vives’ De institutione feminae christianae (1524), first appeared in Dutch translation in 1554, allowing broader access in the Low Countries to the humanist’s views on a woman’s ideal behaviour whether she was unmarried, married, or widowed.22 Vives asserted that a good wife possessed one essential virtue: purity or honourable chastity.23 A woman who engaged in an extramarital affair brought shame to Willem Marinus Hendrik Hummelen, Repertorium van het rederijkersdrama 1500–ca. 1620 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1968). 18 For an overview of Smeken’s oeuvre and the plot of the play, see Anke van Herk, Fabels van liefde: Het mythologischamoureuze toneel van de rederijkers (1475–1621) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), pp. 20–21. 19 Herk, Fabels, pp. 128–32. 20 See Brussels, Koninklijk Bibliotheek van België, MS  II 368. Ingrid Van de Wijer, ‘Hue Mars ende Venus tsaemen bueleerden. Rederijkersspel toegeschreven aan Jan Smeeken, uitgegeven naar MS II 368 Kon. Bibl. Brussel’, in Uut goeder jonsten: Studies aangeboden aan Prof. Dr L. Roose naar aanleiding van zijn emeritaat, ed. by K. Porteman (Leuven: Acco, 1984), pp. 32–92 (p. 34). 21 For notions of conjugal morality and the role of women within marriage during the sixteenth century, see Petty Bange, Grietje Dresen, and Jeanne Marie Noël, ‘“Who Can Find a Virtuous Woman?” Married and Unmarried Women at the Beginning of the Modern Time’, in Saints and She-Devils: Images of Women in the 15th and 16th Centuries, ed.  by Lène Dresen-Coenders and Petty Bange (London: Rubicon Press, 1987), pp. 9–38 (pp. 11–28). 22 The original edition was published in Latin by Michiel Hillen van Hoochstraten in Antwerp in 1524. A revised edition first appeared in 1538. For an English translation, see Juan Luis Vives, Selected Works of J.  L. Vives, ed.  by Constantinus Matheeussen and Charles Fantazzi, trans. by Fantazzi (New York: E. J. Brill, 1996), vi–vii. 23 Vives, Die institutie ende leeringe van een christlijcke vrouwe, so wel in haer joncheyt als in haren houwelijcken staet, ende als si weduwe is (Antwerp: Jan Roelants, 1554), i, vii, as cited in Maria-Theresia Leuker and Herman Roodenburg, ‘“Die dan hare wyven laten afweyen.” Overspel, eer en schande in de zeventiende eeuw’, in Soete minne en helsche boosheit. Seksuele voorstellingen in Nederland, 1300–1850, ed. by Gert Hekma and Roodenburg (Nijmegen: SUN, 1988), pp. 61–84 (p. 66). 17

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her husband, and it was the responsibility of a good wife to resist all such advances. Erasmus, too, treated similar themes in a group of colloquies and more directly in his Encomium matrimonii (1518), Institutio christiani matrimonii (1526), and De vidua christiana (1529). Like Vives, Erasmus stressed the place of chastity in marriage.24 An important response to Vives for the Antwerp context was a French translation of an Italian manual, La institvtione di vna fancivlla nata nobilmente/L’institvtion d’vne fille de noble maison, Traduite de langue Tuscane en François (1555).25 This was the first book off Christophe Plantin’s presses, and the timing of its publication — a year after the Dutch translation of Vives’ De institutione — suggests that the issue of feminine conduct was indeed of the moment. It could also have been an issue of more localized concern. In his 1567 Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, the Italian merchant and Antwerp resident Lodovico Guicciardini gave a thorough account of the cities, local cultures, and notable inhabitants of the Low Countries. Curiously, in his discussion of the general character of the people, he expressly noted their indifferent attitude toward love and sex: ‘sono come persone di natura frigida molto temperati nelle cose di Venere’ (‘as persons of cold nature they are very temperate in the matters of Venus’).26 Guicciardini’s characterization was clearly too cursory and left the virtue of Netherlanders open to question: in 1581, the text was amended to read: ‘sono come persone di natura frigida molto temperati nelle cose di Venere, & abboriscono forte l’adulterio’ (‘as persons of cold nature they are very temperate in the matters of Venus, and they strongly abhor adultery’).27 The added phrase, which is absent from Guicciardini’s original manuscript as well as from the first printed editions, appears in all later editions, including the first Dutch translation of Guicciardini’s text in 1612.28 Whether motivated by zeal or overcompensation, the importance of virtue in matters of marital fidelity could never be too strongly stated. The many representations of the cuckolded husband in Netherlandish popular culture provide another perspective on adultery alongside Vives’ prescriptive and Guicciardini’s descriptive views. The cuckolded husband type went hand in hand with the ‘wiles of women’ genre, in which the sexual power of women was seen as a latent threat to the natural and social orders.29 Joos de Damhouder’s popular handbook on criminal law included a somewhat lengthy discussion of adultery in its various forms accompanied by a woodcut ‘Christians are married to safeguard their chastity, to increase their virtue through mutual association, to bring children into the world not only as a debt to nature but for God’, quoted in Erasmus on Women, ed. by Erika Rummel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 8. 25 Giovanni Michele Bruto, La institutione di una fanciulla nata nobilmente. L’Institution d’une fille de noble maison. Traduite de langue Tuscane en François, trans. by Jean Beller, Facsimile of Anvers, 1555 edition (Antwerp: Algemene Drukkerijen Lloyd Anversois, 1954). 26 Lodovico Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (Antwerp: Willem Silvius, 1567), p. 29B; translation by Martin van Gelderen in The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt, 1555–1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 13–14. 27 Lodovico Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1581), p. 43; Van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt, pp. 13–14. Italics mine. 28 Dina Aristodemo, ‘Lodovico Guicciardini: Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, edizione critica’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1994), p. 171, n. 24; and Lodovico Guicciardini, Beschryvinghe van alle de Neder-landen, anderssins ghenoemt Neder-Duytslandt (Amsterdam: Willem Jansz, 1612), p. 29. 29 Renée Pigeaud, ‘Woman as Temptress: Urban Morality in the 15th Century’, in Saints and She-Devils, ed. by DresenCoenders and Bange, pp.  39–58 (pp.  46–53); and Susan  L. Smith, The Power of Women: A  Topos in Medieval Art and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 191–202. 24

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illustrating a cheating wife.30 The woman, wearing nothing but her nightcap, lies in bed with her lover in a classically appointed interior, her nudity concealed by her pose. Her husband calls out to her through the open door and she attempts to ward off his advance. Her lover is de-emphasized, hidden from the viewer by the bedpost, while her proximity to a female herm framing the illustration reminds the viewer of the charms of the female body. The theme of the seductive wife and the cuckolded husband was so commonplace in Netherlandish culture that it was codified in proverbial form: ‘Zij hangt haar man de blauwe huik om’ (‘She puts the blue cloak on her husband’). Pieter Bruegel placed a literalized version of this proverb in the centre of his 1559 Netherlandish Proverbs; the year before, Frans Hogenberg had placed the same device in an engraving that took the text of the proverb as part of its title.31 The recurrence of this formal motif suggests that the proverb was recognizable enough to serve as a point of entry into these innovative and enigmatic artworks. More to the point, it also suggests the cultural cachet of the topos of the cheating wife. Adultery straddled the spheres of both religious and secular law. It was biblically condemned, a sin against God in the eyes of the church, and grounds for separation, cloistering, or excommunication.32 From the perspective of civil law, adultery was seen as a potential threat to social stability, a cause of further social ills like incest and prostitution, and a burden on the social system required to support unwanted offspring.33 There were legal provisions in place to deal with a variety of circumstances commonly grouped under the heading of adultery, including rape and incest, and the law allowed for severe punishment for these offences, such as lengthy banishment and even execution.34 Records of legal proceedings suggest that such harsh punishments were rarely meted out; the adulteress, however, was generally treated more severely than the adulterer.35 Of the conventional causes of adultery suggested by contemporary literary and legal sources, two seem particularly relevant to the paintings of Mars and Venus Surprised and to larger concerns in sixteenth-century society: feminine allure and age disparity between husband and wife.

For a facsimile of the Dutch edition published in Leiden in 1555, see Joos de Damhoudere, Practycke ende handbouck in criminele zaeken, verchiert met zommeghe schoone figuren en beilde ter materie dienede, ed. by Jozef Dauwe and Jos Monballyu (Roeselare: Den Wijngaert, 1981), pp. 145–48. 31 The painting was recorded under the title ‘the blue cloak’ in an inventory of 1639. See David Kunzle, ‘Bruegel’s Proverb Painting and the World Upside Down’, The Art Bulletin, 59 (1977), 197–202 (p. 198). For the relationship between the Hogenberg print and the Bruegel painting as well as issues around the works’ titles, see Mark A. Meadow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs and the Practice of Rhetoric (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2002), pp. 99–101, 132–33. 32 De Damhoudere, Practycke ende handbouck in criminele zaeken, p.  147. See also Filips Wielant, Corte instructie in materie criminele, ed.  by Jos Monballyu (Brussels: AWLsK, 1995), 1510  edn, Chapter 57. 3, p.  87; 1515–1516  edn, Chapter 90. 3, p. 215. Less severe forms of punishment included prayer penance and fines. For legal separation (divorciam quoad thorum et mensam) and its grounds, see Philippe Godding, Le Droit privé dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux du 12e au 18e siècle (Bruxelles: Académie Royale de Belgique, 1987), pp.  105–06; and Monique Vleeschouwers-Van Melkebeek, ‘Marital Breakdown Before the Consistory Courts of Brussels, Cambrai and Tournai: Judicial Separation a Mensa et Thoro’, Tijdschrift voor rechtsgeschiedenis, 72 (2004), 81–90. 33 For adultery in the eyes of secular authorities in sixteenth-century Germany, particularly Ulm, see Jason  P. Coy, Strangers and Misfits: Banishment, Social Control, and Authority in Early Modern Germany (Boston: Brill, 2008), pp. 65–74. 34 Wielant, Corte instructie in materie criminele, 1510 edn, Chapter 57, pp. 87–88; 1515–1516 edn, Chapter 90, pp. 215–19. 35 Ordinances and guild regulations register the moral significance of adultery for the urban population. Punishments were most severe when an affair was scandalous and public. See Myriam Carlier and Peter Stabel, ‘Questions de moralité dans les villes de la Flandre au bas moyen âge: sexualité et activité législative urbaine (bans échevinaux et statuts de métiers)’, in Faire bans, edictz et statuz: Légiférer dans la ville médiévale. Sources, objets et acteurs de l’activité législative communale en Occident, ca. 1200–1500. Actes du colloque international tenu à Bruxelles les 17–20 novembre 1999 (Brussels: Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, 2001), pp. 241–62 (pp. 255–60). For a double standard in the punishment of men and women, see Leuker and Roodenburg, ‘“Die dan hare wyven laten afweyen”’, p. 72. 30

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In the story of Mars and Venus Surprised, the basic motivations seem to have been easily understood: the virile Mars is attracted to the seductively beautiful Venus, and she readily acquiesces to his advances because she is the goddess of love. This superficial and character-based explanation undergirds the story and gave Netherlandish painters license to depict ideal nudes as embodiments of male virility and female beauty.36 It also challenged painters to depict Venus’s erotic appeal in order to attract viewers in the same way Mars had been enticed. Mars is typically shown as impressive and potent; his tanned, muscular form and richly decorated armour denote his strength and rank. His helmet is plumed and worked with fine details in gold; his body armour is custom forged to fit the appealing topography of his figure; and his sword, adorned with an attractive sculptural hilt, is concealed within in an elaborately wrought scabbard.37 In two of the paintings, Mars still wears his helmet while lying with Venus — a playful conceit suggesting the urgency of the encounter as well as Venus’s power to make her lover look a bit silly as she conquers the conqueror. In nearly all the paintings, Venus is distinguished by her placement and nudity, sometimes decorously mitigated by draped bed linens. Her soft-seeming pale flesh contrasts with that of her lover and their darker surroundings, drawing attention to her form. The painter’s ability to attract a viewer’s gaze with life-like renderings of flesh and to draw him or her into closer and sustained contemplation was thematised in a sonnet by Lucas de Heere published in the painter-poet’s Den hof en boomgaerd der poësien of 1565. Significantly, the sonnet describes the experience of two gentlemen before a painting of a nude by Willem Key, which Koenraad Jonckheere suggests may have been Key’s Venus and Amor.38 Netherlandish painters gave their viewers the chance to see the adulterous offence from Mars’s perspective by emphasizing the power of feminine allure. A yet more resonant motivation for Venus’s extramarital dalliance was proposed in Ovid’s Ars amatoria. The goddess is reported to have laughed at Vulcan’s limp and his work-hardened hands, and to have cruelly imitated her lame husband to her lover, Mars. Ovid emphasized the mismatch of the beautiful young Venus to the misshapen old Vulcan; this inflection of the story reappeared in the Middle Ages in the Roman de la rose, and Venus’s ill-suitability to her husband lived on as both texts circulated in print throughout the sixteenth century. The Brussels rederijker Jan Smeken may have had such sources in mind when he penned the play Hue Mars en Venus tsaemen bueleerden. The work includes a lengthy examination of Venus’s motivation for her affair with Mars, and Vulcan is lampooned as a hideous brute throughout, thereby tempering Venus’s offence.39

In Netherlandish painting, the pictorial tradition of the ideal male nude as embodiment of strength and virility was initiated by Gossart. See Sluijter, ‘Prestige and Emulation, Eroticism and Morality: Mythology and the Nude in Dutch Painting of the 16th and 17th Century’ in Greek Gods and Heroes in the Age of Rubens and Rembrandt, ed. by Peter Schoon and Sander Paarlberg (Athens: National Gallery/Alexandros Soutzos Museum; Dordrecht: Dordrechts Museum, 2000), pp. 35–39. 37 For the relationship between the detailed renderings of Mars’s arms and armour and the ‘ornamental visual aesthetic’ of French Renaissance poetry, see Giancarlo Fiorenza’s contribution to this volume. 38 Lucas De Heere, Den hof en boomgaerde der poesiën, ed.  by Werner Waterschoot (Zwolle: W.  E.  J. Tjeenk Willink, 1969), xlvii, pp. 54–55; and Jonckheere, Willem Key, pp. 174–75, no. A94. 39 Hans Van Dijk and Femke Kramer, ‘Hue Mars en Venus tsaemen bueleerden: Het overspel van Mars en Venus’, in Europees toneel van Middeleeuwen naar Renaissance, ed.  by M.  Gosman (Groningen: BoekWerk, 1991), pp.  229–302 (p. 231); and Charlotte Steenbrugge, ‘Jan Smeeken: Sinnekens and Devils’, European Medieval Drama, 12 (2008), 49–66 (p. 59). I thank Elsa Strietman for sharing her English translation of the Smeken text before it was published as ‘How Mars and Venus Dallied Together’, in For Pleasure and Profit: Six Dutch Rhetoricians Plays, ed. and trans. by Strietman and Peter Happé (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013), pp. 1–73. 36

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The popularity at mid-century of depictions of Mars and Venus Surprised seems plausibly connected to the Netherlandish pictorial tradition of the Unequal Couple.40 This amusing theme had already appeared in painting, though it was more popularly known in the Low Countries through prints by German and Netherlandish artists.41 Depictions of the theme generally focused on the two mismatched lovers, often shown half-length in a landscape, tavern, or indeterminate setting. The moneybags and purses that appear in many of the images impute a pecuniary motivation to these often witty pictures. Vulcan’s insistence that Mars pay him the adulterer’s fine, as recounted in the Homeric poem (Odyssey vii. 329–32), suggests the blacksmith god’s attempt to regain his dignity through financial restitution and attests to the long-standing cultural tendency to commodify sexual acts and to regulate their transaction.42 Nurtured Ambiguity Paintings of Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan invite the viewer to evaluate the scene in the same way that Vulcan had invited his fellow Olympians to cast judgement on the ensnared, adulterous couple. Netherlandish artists complicated the viewer’s ability to derive an unequivocal moral tone from these works by incorporating motifs and invoking parallel discourses that offered differently nuanced views on desire, marital ethics, and appropriate reactions to transgressive behaviour. Learned audiences presumably took pleasure in articulating and resolving these various perspectives in ways that had relevance for their own lives.43 All the textual sources for the story of Mars and Venus surprised by Vulcan agree on one point: the gods laughed uproariously at the sight of the two lovers caught in bed together.44 Homer suggests it was not only the sight itself but the irony of the situation that the gods found so amusing — the lame Vulcan had trapped the capable Mars through his craftsmanship.45 It is curious then, that this laughter is almost entirely absent from the More than a pictorial tradition, the notion of unequal coupling had broad social resonance. For example, incompatibility between husband and wife was grounds for judicial separation in some cities in the Low Countries. See Vleeschouwers-Van Melkebeek, ‘Aspects du lien matrimonial dans le Liber Sentenciarum de Bruxelles (1448–1459)’, Tijdschrift voor rechtsgeschiedenis, 53 (1985), 43–97 (pp. 67–74); and Vleeschouwers-Van Melkebeek, ‘Marital Breakdown’. Sixteenth-century literary and legal sources also reflect growing anxiety around the coupling of individuals from different social classes. See Marc Boone, Thérèse de Hemptinne, and Walter Prevenier, ‘Fictie en historische realiteit. Colijn van Rijsseles “De Spiegel Der Minnen”, ook een spiegel van sociale spanningen in de Nederlanden der late Middeleeuwen?’, Jaarboek De Fonteine, 34 (1984), 9–33. 41 For a well-known example, see Quentin Massys’s Ill-Matched Lovers, c. 1520/5, oil on panel, 42.3 × 63 cm, Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, inv. no. 1971.55.1. For a broad discussion of the theme, see Alison G. Stewart, Unequal Lovers a Study of Unequal Couples in Northern Art (New York: Abaris Books, 1977). 42 Homer also has Vulcan demand that Jupiter return all the gifts Vulcan gave him while wooing his daughter, Venus (Odyssey viii. 306–20). Though Venus was known to be the daughter of Uranus, Homer’s Iliad named Zeus ( Jupiter) and Dione (no direct Roman equivalent) as the parents of Aphrodite (Venus), and this story from the Odyssey remains consistent with Homer’s earlier work. For money bags as metaphors for male sexual expenditure, see Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 158–90. 43 For a discussion of the over-interpretation of artworks within the convivium tradition in contemporary Netherlandish culture, see Todd M. Richardson, Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Art Discourse in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands, Visual Culture in Early Modernity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 63–81. 44 Sixteenth-century viewers may well have laughed too, since jokes about love and sex were among the most widely represented in jestbooks. See Johan Verberckmoes, Laughter, Jestbooks and Society in the Spanish Netherlands (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 159–63. 45 ‘Unquenchable laughter arose among the blessed gods as they saw the craft of wise Hephaestus’; Homer, Odyssey, Volume I: Books 1–12, trans. by A.  T. Murray, rev. by George  E. Dimock, Loeb Classical Library civ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919), p. 281. I quote here and below from current standard editions of classical texts, which after a cursory review are not substantially different in the relevant passages from sixteenth-century editions. 40

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paintings. Jupiter’s open-mouthed, apple-cheeked expression in Heemskerck’s Vienna panel is the closest thing to laughter discernable in any of the works. Given the general paucity of contemporary paintings that show laughter at all, it might be argued that the Netherlandish artists were simply conforming to pictorial conventions that considered laughter as indecorous — the province of children, peasants, fools, and the mentally ill.46 There was, however, a documented technical interest in the depiction of laughter at this time. Lomazzo tells of Leonardo’s attention to facial expressions and how the artist held a banquet at which he told funny stories for the express purpose of studying the contortions of the laughing face.47 In chapter VI of the Grondt der edel vrij schilder-const, Karel Van Mander discusses the depiction of emotions, giving an account of the sometimes tricky differentiation of laughing from crying.48 It is therefore remarkable that painters like Floris, Key, and Heemskerck were reluctant to depict laughter in images of Mars and Venus Surprised given its centrality to human experience, the professional challenge it posed, and the narrative emphasis on laughter in all source texts for the myth. The ancient texts had used the gods’ laughter to mock Vulcan’s suffering. They flippantly dismissed his feelings of betrayal and suggested that Mars’s predicament, caught as he was in bed with Venus, was embarrassing yet enviable, thereby justifying the adultery. Had the gods expressed outrage when Vulcan revealed the lovers to their collective gaze, the story and the paintings of it would have articulated a simple and straightforward condemnation of adultery. In order to cultivate a degree of moral ambiguity around the story, then, Netherlandish painters downplayed the flippant humour of the source texts and exploited the complex psychological profiles of the gods that allowed them to be held up as positive and negative exempla. A print published by Hieronymus Cock in 1553 illustrates this intentional ambiguity (Figure  2).49 The engraving shows many of the elements that are common to the paintings: Mars and Venus embracing (though here somewhat more explicitly), a bank of clouds supporting a group of male and female gods who look on, and a crestfallen Vulcan sitting off to the side. However, the two inscriptions — one in a banderole that runs along the bottom of the print and another in a square cartouche held aloft by a winged figure — give interpretive cues to the viewer that are absent from the paintings. Heemskerck’s Family Portrait (c. 1530, oil on panel, 118.7 × 140.2 cm, Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, inv. no. GK 33) is one of the few paintings from this circle of artists to show laughter and, even here, it is a child who is shown laughing — a person who lacks the self-control and socialization of an adult. A lost painting of a mother and child by Floris, c. 1553–56, represents a woman smiling broadly with teeth showing — a typical though not necessary indication of laughter, Van de Velde, Frans Floris, i, pp. 190–91, no. S40; ii, fig. 10. For laughter in the context of sixteenth-century peasant scenes, see Hessel Miedema, ‘Feestende boeren — lachende dorpers. Bij twee recente aanwinsten van het Rijksprentenkabinet’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, 29 (1981), 191–213 (pp. 204–08); and Hessel Miedema, ‘Realism and the Comic Mode: The Peasant’, Simiolus, 9 (1977), 205–19 (p. 211). On the representation of laughter as an affect, see Noël Schiller, ‘Desire and Dissimulation: Laughter as an Expressive Behavior in Karel van Mander’s “Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const” (1604)’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 60 (2010), 83–107. 47 Miedema, ‘Realism’, p. 210. This anecdote is similar in spirit to the one Van Mander tells about Bruegel, who dressed up as a peasant to better integrate with country folk and thus to study their mannerisms. See Karel Van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the First Edition of the Schilder-Boeck (1603–1604): Preceded by the Lineage, Circumstances and Place of Birth, Life and Works of Karel Van Mander, Painter and Poet and Likewise His Death and Burial, from the Second Edition of the Schilder-Boeck (1616–1618), ed. and trans. by Hessel Miedema, 6 vols (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1994), i, pp. 190–91, fol. 233r, ll. 33–43. 48 Karel van Mander, Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const, trans. by Miedema, 2  vols (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker & Gumbert, 1973), i, p. 169; and Van Mander, Den grondt, vi, ll. 36–37. It is the same point Leon Battista Alberti had made some hundred and fifty years earlier. See Alberti, On Painting, ed.  by Martin Kemp, trans. by Cecil Grayson (London: Penguin; New York: Viking Penguin, 1991), p. 77. 49 Timothy A. Riggs, Hieronymus Cock Printmaker and Publisher (New York: Garland, 1977), p. 375, no. 254. For the origin of the composition and its elements, see Ziefer, ‘Marte e Venere sorpresi da Vulcano’. 46

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Fig. 2: After Baldassare Peruzzi, published by Hieronymus Cock, Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, 1553, engraving, 23.1 × 26 cm. British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

The text in the banderole is a Latin excerpt from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (IV. 184–88) that relates the climax of the story: ‘In medijs ambo depraensj amplexibus herent Turpiter. atque aliquis de Dijs non tristibque, optat sic fierj turpis’ (‘Having both been caught in the middle of an embrace, they remained fixed together in a shameful way. And one of the gods, none of whom were sad, wished he could be so ashamed’).50 The inclusion of the final, envious remark — which the Homeric version ascribes to Mercury — complicates any straightforward moralizing reading of the print. While the first half of the text emphasizes the shameful conduct of Mars and Venus, the latter half softens the degree of that shame by suggesting it was a small price to pay for the pleasure of making love to Venus. Any indignation felt on Vulcan’s behalf is thus tempered by a concession to desire.

The excerpt is a selective rendering of Ovid’s text: ‘in mediis ambo deprensi amplexibus haerent. Lemnius extemplo valvas patefecit eburnas inmistique deos; illi iacuere ligati turpiter, atque alitquis de dis non tristibus optat sic fieri turpis’ (omitted words in italics), Ovid, Metamorphoses, Volume I: Books 1–8, trans. by Frank Justus Miller, rev. by G.  P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library xlii (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), pp. 190–91. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

50

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The text in the cartouche expands on the power of desire: ‘Cicero   | Malorum esca,  | voluptas qua ho-  | mines capiuntur,  | ut hamo pisces’ (‘As Cicero says: pleasure is the bait of evil, by which men are taken as fish by the hook’). The passage derives from De senectute (xiii. 44), in which Cicero takes a device likening pleasure to fishers’ bait from Plato’s Timaeus (69d) and repurposes it in a discussion of old age and sensual pleasure.51 Defending old age against the argument that it is void of enjoyment and thus a deplorable state of being, Cicero, in the guise of Cato Maior, attempts to diffuse the charge by vilifying pleasure. He supports this view by citing a speech reportedly given by one of Plato’s good friends, Achytas of Tarentum (Sen. xiii. 39–40): Nullam capitaliorem pestem quam voluptatem corporis hominibus dicebat a natura datam, cuius voluptatis avidae libidines temere et ecfrenate ad potiendum incitarentur  […] Nullum denique scelus, nullum malum facinus esse, ad quod suscipiendum non libido voluptatis impelleret; stupra vero et adulteria et omne tale flagitium nullis excitari aliis illecebris nisi voluptatis. ‘No more deadly curse’, said [Achytas], ‘has been given by nature to man than carnal pleasure, through eagerness for which the passions are driven recklessly and uncontrollably to its gratification […] In short, there is no criminal purpose and no evil deed which the lust for pleasure will not drive men to undertake. Indeed, rape, adultery, and every like offence are set in motion by the enticements of pleasure and by nothing else’.52

Though Cicero maligns the drive for pleasure and criticizes it as a youthful fault, he admits that ‘quamquam immoderatis epulis caret senectus, modicis tamen conviviis delectari potest’ (‘old age, though it lacks immoderate banquets, may find delight in temperate repasts’).53 While Cicero’s condemnation of pleasure is conveyed by the text in the print’s cartouche, his subsequent concession to it would have been known to a particularly erudite audience alone. This extended and intertextual commentary on the power of desire is an unsurprising context for a representation of Mars and Venus caught in an extramarital affair. Nevertheless, the inscriptions in the 1553 print, and the Ciceronian quote in particular, temper what would have been two extreme ways of viewing the image: the jovial and dismissive response suggested by the laughter of the gods on the one hand and the morally indignant reaction suffered by Vulcan on the other. The complicated nature of desire articulated in the print reflects the Netherlandish intellectual milieu before the Iconoclasm of 1566, in which art could function as a site for the expression of a range of nuanced views. Some thirty years later, the inscription accompanying a print of the same subject by Hendrick Goltzius would come down unequivocally on the side of Vulcan, condemning adultery and its concomitant secrecy with particular ‘But if some concession must be made to pleasure, since her allurements are difficult to resist, and she is, as Plato happily says, “the bait of sin,” — evidently because men are caught therewith like fish — then I admit that old age, though it lacks immoderate banquets, may find delight in temperate repasts’. Cicero, On Old Age. On Friendship. On Divination, trans. by W. A. Falconer, Loeb Classical Library 154 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), p. 55. 52 Cicero, On Old Age, pp. 48–49. 53 See n.  51. ‘Immoderate banquets’ relate to another conventionally recognized cause for adultery — an excessive consumption of food and drink. 51

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zeal.54 ‘Ut Phoebus nitido lascivum lumine Martem, et Paphiae prodit turpiae furta Deae: sic fucata Deus sceleratae crimina vitae cernit, et occultum non sinit esse nefas’ (‘Just as Phoebus, the god of the sun, reveals with his shining light the lustful Mars and the secret infamy of Venus, so does God discover the crimes of an evil life and prevents sinful things from remaining hidden’).55 The voice behind this view can also be heard in the Hieronymus Cock print, but in 1553, it is one voice among many. The ambiguous attitude toward the morality of the story of Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan was not confined to the visual arts. The rederijker play by Jan Smeken, Hue Mars en Venus tsaemen bueleerden, which was transcribed in Amsterdam in 1551, also showed a certain degree of ambivalence toward the mythological affair. The play has been noted for its surprising lack of moralization: ‘in Mars en Venus, probably at least partly because the protagonists are supposedly immortal gods, there is no emphasis on damnation or salvation. In fact, there is very little emphasis on right or wrong at all’.56 The sinnekens in the play, characters which personify natural desires or intellectual concepts and which would normally be expected to frame the performance and give interpretive cues to the audience, take a fairly neutral stance toward the adulterous act, instead emphasizing the indecorousness of Vulcan’s exposure of the lovers to the other gods and falling back upon the cliché of the unfaithfulness of women in general.57 For his part, Vulcan expresses a regret grounded in pragmatism: had he let the lovers continue their dalliance, Venus would have been unusually pleasant and sexually available to him so as not to arouse his suspicion.58 The early Antwerp paintings of Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan by Floris, Key, and Sellaer need to be seen with the same moral flexibility advocated by the rederijker play and the contemporary print published by Hieronymus Cock. While imagery that allows for ambiguous, if not conflicting, interpretations has long been hailed as a hallmark of the work of Pieter Bruegel, this quality is clearly to be found in the works of his contemporaries as well. Netherlandish history painters, like rederijkers with their words, carefully orchestrated the elements on their panels and canvases to provide opportunities for multivalent readings of established narratives. Of all the paintings of Mars, Venus, and Vulcan in question, Floris’s version of 1547 (Figure 3) might best reflect this approach, since it appears to be a conversation among the gods about adultery, rather than an illustration of the mythological tale alone. As Fiona Healy has noted, the reading of Floris’s panel is facilitated by the many pointing hands that bring attention to significant details in the composition. Healy specifically mentions Minerva, who points at Cupid below. Cupid is slowly removing Mars’s sword from its sheath, which suggests that Mars will soon return to his war mongering once he can no longer lie with Venus.59 Healy is certainly correct to emphasize the allegorical significance of Cupid here, but he carries mythographic and symbolic significance as well. According to Hesiod’s Theogony (933–37), the adulterous union of Mars and Venus For the print, see Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617): Drawings, Prints and Paintings, ed. by Huigen Leeflang and Ger Luijten (Zwolle: Waanders, 2003), pp. 50–53, cat. no. 13, fig. 13.2. 55 English translation of Latin inscription from Anne  W. Lowenthal, Joachim Wtewael: Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, Getty Museum Studies on Art (Malibu: Getty Museum, 1995), p. 35. 56 Steenbrugge, ‘Jan Smeeken’, p. 55. 57 Steenbrugge, ‘Jan Smeeken’, pp. 55–56. 58 Herk, Fabels, pp. 44–45. 59 Fiona Healy, ‘Bedrooms and Banquets: Mythology in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting’, in Concept, Design and Execution in Flemish Painting (1550–1700), ed. by Hans Vlieghe, Arnout Balis, and Van de Velde (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp. 73–96 (pp. 85–86). 54

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Fig. 3: Frans Floris, Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, 1547, oil on panel, 150 × 198 cm, lost, formerly Berlin. Photo Collection RKD, The Hague.

produced a daughter, Concordia (in Greek, Harmonia). Thus, there was a parallel tradition that saw the affair of Mars and Venus as productive and beneficial.60 It is no coincidence that Cupid reminds the gods of the beneficial side of the affair: in some mythological traditions, he too was the son of Mars and Venus.61 Cupid’s prominent position in the centre of the painting places him between Venus and her husband Vulcan, as potential bastard son, as stand-in for Concordia (another illegitimate child), and as a possible cause and symbol of the affair itself as the god of erotic love. Cupid thus sits at the moral centre of the work, presenting himself as a paradigmatic index of polyvalence.62

Gombrich sees this tradition as a source for Mantegna’s Parnassus and identifies the textual source as a first-century allegorization of Homer by a rhetorician named Heraclitus. The text was first printed in 1505 but also circulated in manuscript form. See Ernst Gombrich, ‘An Interpretation of Mantegna’s “Parnassus”’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 26 (1963), 196–98. 61 One of the better-known sources for this tradition was Nonnus’s Dionysiaca (v. 135–44), in which Cupid’s parentage is explained at the wedding of Concordia to Cadmus. 62 Though textually unattested at the scene of the affair, the pictorial tradition often placed Cupid in the company of Venus. Gossart’s Venus and Amor still bears an original inscription on its frame that chastises Cupid for not sparing his own mother from his mischief. See Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance: The Complete Works, ed. by Maryan Wynn Ainsworth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 226–29, cat. no. 33. The sleeping Cupid in some paintings of Mars and Venus Surprised might refer to the post-coital state of the lovers; however, Cupid is an active participant in Floris’s Sibiu panel (Figure 5), caressing Venus’s breast. This boldness might have been a response to Key’s painting, in which Cupid’s strategic position conceals Mars’s genitals in spite of the latter’s splayed legs; nevertheless, the placement of Cupid’s forearm — a visual substitute for the war god’s erect penis — cleverly yet decorously refers to the sexual play. 60

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Art and Artifice The climax of the story of Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan hinges upon the blacksmith god’s craft. Texts that describe the moment of capture all emphasize Vulcan’s skilful workmanship, for even the god of war could not see that he had walked into a trap. The net that Vulcan created in his forge was variously described as: ‘tela araneae subtilis, quam nemo uidere queat, neq; ex dijs beatis, sic enim dolosam fecerat’ (‘fine as a spider’s web, which no one is able to see, [no one] out of the blessed gods neither, for thus [Vulcan] had made it crafty’);63 ‘graciles ex aere catenas retiaque et laqueos, quae lumina fallere possent’ (‘a net of fine links of bronze, so thin that they would escape detection of the eye’);64 ‘obscuros […] laqueos: lumina fallit opus’ (‘hidden snares[…]; the device baffles the eye’);65 and ‘latz subtilz e desliez  […] dequoy nul deulx rien ne scavoit’ (‘fine, thin nets […] that neither [Mars nor Venus] knew anything about’).66 The repeated emphasis on the fineness of the links — so fine as to be invisible — suggests that Vulcan’s net pushed the very limits of his craft. Any thoughtful painter treating the theme must have recognized the parallel between Vulcan’s art and his own. The divine blacksmith had ensnared Mars and Venus (the admirer of beauty and beauty herself ) with his fine workmanship. Similarly, the painter sought to hold the viewer captive before his beautiful work — a task that needed equal cunning and skill. Indeed, a faithful depiction of the mythological narrative made the parallel all the more forceful, since the painter would have had to find a way to paint the invisible net, thus recapitulating Vulcan’s own achievement. For some artists, this challenge went unanswered. The works by Maerten van Heemskerck clearly show Mars and Venus beneath a fine net, privileging narrative clarity over all else. However, one of the more curious aspects of the series of works produced in the Brabantine milieu is the conspicuous absence of netting. While it might be argued that Vulcan’s finely wrought links were omitted because the prospect of Mars and Venus bound awkwardly together would have been unappealing, it could also be that it was simply thought easier to leave the invisible chains invisible. A third and more interesting possibility is that the invisible net needed to be alluded to without being explicitly depicted in order to do justice to the themes of Vulcan-as-artist and artist-as-Vulcan.67 Starting with Frans Floris’s panel of 1547, most of the surviving Antwerp paintings of Mars and Venus Surprised do not show any visible net. In each case, the adultery is revealed to a throng of gods, yet nothing seems to prevent the couple from fleeing in shame. The early painting by Floris shows a fringed cloth draped across Venus’s legs, partially concealing her genitals, but this can hardly be identified as Vulcan’s net. A similar cloth with a more net-like pattern drapes across Vulcan’s leg; if this is the net with which the lovers were Homer, Poetarum omninm seculorum longe principis Homeri (Basel: Nicolaum Bryling. & Bartholomaeum Calybaeum, 1551), p. 69. The first Dutch translation of books 1–12 of The Odyssey (1561) were prepared from this Latin edition (see n. 81); I quote it here since few would have encountered the story in its original Greek. See also Homer, Odyssey, Volume I, pp. 292–93. 64 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Volume I, pp. 190–1. 65 Ovid, Art of Love. Cosmetics. Remedies for Love. Ibis. Walnut-tree. Sea Fishing. Consolation, trans. by J. H. Mozley, rev. by G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library ccxxxii (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), pp. 104–05. 66 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung, Le Rommant de la Rose, nouvellement reveu et corrige outre les precedentes impressions, ed. by Clément Marot (Paris: Jean Longis, 1538), p. 338; translation from Guillaume De Lorris and Jean De Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. by Charles Dahlberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 300. 67 For the possibility that Tintoretto used his own features in his paintings of Vulcan, see Cieri Via, ‘Venere, Vulcano e Marte’, p. 363. 63

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Fig. 4: Gian Jacopo Caraglio, Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, c. 1550, engraving, 20.8 × 25 cm. Print Room, Dresden State Art Collection. Photo: Herbert Boswank.

caught, it adds little to the narrative, failing to explain why Mars and Venus remain together after their release. The relief-like composition distributes the gods in a way that de-emphasizes the story as a sequence of events in favour of a static web of gesticulating figures — the painting is less a narrative of adultery than it is a conversation about it. If there is a net to be discerned in this panel, it is one implied by the crisscrossing gazes and gestures that hold the gods and goddesses in a tight pattern parallel to the picture plane. A print of the subject by the Italian artist Jacopo Caraglio (Figure 4) must have circulated through Antwerp a few years later, since its formal solutions turn up in some of the subsequent versions by painters working in the city. Caraglio compresses a series of moments not only into one image but into one plane. This gives the impression that the events occur distinctly yet simultaneously and leads Caraglio to build an innovative bridge across the narrative gap between Vulcan’s first news of the affair and the eventual capture of the two lovers.68 The blacksmith god is shown low to the ground, pulling on a chain leading into the nearby bed where Mars and Venus are lustfully entangled. Though Vulcan’s strain is unmistakable, the chain upon which he pulls is both there and not there — it seems to follow the line of his left arm into the corner of the bedding, where it disappears and merges into the folds of the 68

De Jong, ‘Ovidian Fantasies’, p. 163.

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Fig. 5: Vincent Sellaer, Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, c. 1550–60, oil on panel, 113 × 142.2 cm. Antwerp, Rubenshuis. © Photograph: Lowie De Peuter & Michel Wuyts.

sheets. The embracing couple and their beautiful bodies are in no way marred by the lines of any netting nor the impression of it pulling into their skin; the net remains invisible to them both, just as it had been described by Homer and Ovid. By making Vulcan an active participant in the scene, something not found in the textual sources, Caraglio has found an elegant solution to the challenge of making the invisible visible. This motif would form the basis for Vincent Sellaer’s composition a few years later, in which one of Vulcan’s assistants positioned in the middle ground pulls tight the visible ends of an implied net of chains (Figure 5). Sellaer takes Caraglio’s solution even further: Vulcan’s assistant, with a slight twist of his body, appears to pull the foregrounded lovers toward the cloudbank approaching from the background, where the gods strain to see the adulterous pair, thus bringing two distinct moments in pictorial space and time into contact with one another. Willem Key also must have been aware of Caraglio’s print, since he seems to have drawn inspiration from its depiction of the gods in the clouds (Figure 6).69 At first glance, Caraglio’s group of Jupiter, Saturn, and a loose-haired female figure seems to have provided Key with an example for his own Ceres, Neptune, and Minerva. Key’s group is also indebted to Floris’s 1547 panel, in which the reclining figure of Juno has much in common with Key’s Ceres. For a discussion of Key’s technique of adapting the innovations of his peers, see Jonckheere, Willem Key, pp. 33–39.

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Fig. 6: Willem Key, Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, c. 1550–55, oil on panel, 146 × 210 cm. Herzog Anton UlrichMuseum Braunschweig, Kunstmuseum des Landes Niedersachsen.

Key’s approach to the moment of capture and the problem of the net has more in common with Floris’s earlier painting — Vulcan’s pose suggests some sort of action, but it is unclear if he readies himself to throw an unseen mesh over the lovers or if he is in the process of removing it. Vulcan’s vague movement thus conflates the two moments so that the viewer can proceed to the throng of on-looking gods, completing the narrative of transgression, entrapment, revelation, and judgement. Upon close examination, traces of a fine, net-like fabric can be made out on the bed behind the couple; it may be one of Venus’s seductive accoutrements cast aside in the heat of the moment, or it may be Key’s way of playing with the notion of visibility, invisibility, and poor visibility. In any case, the net is not an emphasized aspect of the painting. Instead, the anvil upon which Vulcan rests his right hand and the tongs nearby remind us of his handicraft and are far more prominent indices of the invisible chains. Floris and Heemskerck would soon return to the subject. The surviving panels suggest that both painters stuck to their respective solutions: Floris’s Sibiu panel (Figure 7), though cut down, gives no indication that the lovers are caught in the fabled net, whereas Heemskerck’s 1561 panel (Figure 8) clearly shows Vulcan and an assistant throwing a web over the fornicating pair. Floris’s use of pictorial depth as a way to introduce narrative time into the image is a major departure from his 1547 formulation of the scene, and can likely be attributed to his knowledge of the works of Key and Sellaer. Documentary records suggest that Floris depicted the subject at least twice more during his career. A 1613 inventory of the Duke of Aarschot’s paintings in the Château de Beaumont describes two versions of the theme by Floris: ‘Mars, Vénus et Cupido couchés ensamble, les aultres dieux les regardans’ (‘Mars, Venus, and Cupid lying together, the other gods watching them’) and ‘Mars et 263

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Fig. 7: Frans Floris, Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, c. 1560, oil on panel, 93 × 115 cm (cut down, original dimensions uncertain). Sibiu, Brukenthal National Museum.

Vénus, couché par ensamble, tous les aultres dieux les regardans et prenans au filet’ (‘Mars and Venus lying together, all the other gods watching and catching them in the net’).70 That the same subject recurs in this inventory with distinct descriptions suggests that the paintings themselves were significantly different and that Vulcan’s net might have been an important element of the second work. Unfortunately, neither of these paintings survives to give an indication of Floris’s evolving conception of the theme. The challenge offered by Vulcan’s fabled invisible net provided Netherlandish artists with an opportunity to compete not only with one another but also with the venerated painters of antiquity. Both of Ovid’s descriptions of Vulcan’s trap (Ars Am. ii. 577–78; Met. iv. 176–77) use forms of the verb fallere, which can be variously translated as ‘deceive’, ‘beguile’, ‘escape the notice of ’, or ‘trip’.71 It is the same word that Pliny the Elder uses to describe the legendary painting competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, in which the former deceived the birds with his naturalistic depiction of grapes, but Parrhasius’s painting of a curtain deceived the artist Zeuxis himself (Nat.  Hist. xxxv. 36. 66).72 A proficient Van de Velde, Frans Floris, i, pp. 492–94, doc. 108, nos 79, 83. ‘Obscuros […] laqueos: lumina fallit opus’, Ovid, Art of Love, p. 104; ‘Graciles ex aere catenas retiaque et laqueos, quae lumina fallere possent’, Ovid, Metamorphoses: Volume I, p. 190. Italics mine. 72 ‘Quoniam ipse volucres fefellisset, Parrhasius autem se artificem’, Pliny, Natural History, Volume IX: Books 33–35, trans. by H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library cccxciv (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 310.

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Fig. 8: Maerten van Heemskerck, History of Alectryon, 1561, oil on canvas transferred from panel, 62 × 98.5 cm. © St Petersburg GBUK, Pavlovsk State Museum, St Petersburg, 2013.

painter could beguile a viewer through the skilled application of his or her craft, just as Vulcan’s fine work had escaped the notice of Mars and Venus. Vulcan and the painter operate at two extremes of the same continuum — Vulcan’s work was so skilled and subtle as to be unseen, while the painter’s studied skill required making visible and credible that which was not there to begin with. The genre of deception involved in the painter’s brief is thus connected to Pliny’s praise of Apelles’ ability to paint things that cannot be painted. Pliny cites thunder, thunderbolts, and lightning as elements that Apelles found a way to represent despite their intangible nature (Nat. Hist. xxv. 36. 98). Vulcan’s net, forged of such fine links that they were invisible even to the gods, must also have belonged to such a category of phenomena. It is perhaps no coincidence that thunderbolts are present in the Netherlandish paintings of Mars and Venus Surprised from Heemkerk’s 1545 panel onward. These paintings depict Jupiter gazing down at the surprised couple, accompanied by two attributes: his eagle and his thunderbolts. This seeming redundancy might be a sly play on Pliny’s description of the prince of painters’ skill. It might also be a subtle allusion to another classical connection, Seneca’s Phaedra, which credits Vulcan with the forging of Jupiter’s thunderbolts (124–27) within a larger dramatic dialogue on carnal desire that makes explicit reference to Mars and Venus bound by chains (188–91).73 The Antwerp painters that consciously engaged with the topos of representing that which could not be painted might have had yet another ancient paragon in mind: Timanthes (Pliny, Nat. Hist. xxxv. 36. 74). ‘Atque in unius huius operibus intelligitur plus An edition of Seneca’s Phaedra, also know under the title Hippolytus, was published in Deventer by Albert Pafraet in 1525. Both Dirck Volkertsz Coornhert and Hadrianus Junius, two of Heemkerck’s later collaborators, would eventually publish editions of Seneca’s works, though not the Phaedra itself.

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semper quam pingitur et, cum sit ars summa, ingenium tamen ultra artem est’ (‘Indeed, Timanthes is the only artist in whose works more is always implied than is depicted, and whose execution, though consummate, is always surpassed by his genius’).74 The Timanthes topos was well established within Netherlandish humanist circles: Erasmus ascribed the same qualities to Albrecht Dürer, as did Abraham Ortelius to Pieter Bruegel.75 Floris and Key were certainly familiar with Pliny’s writings on art from their time spent at Lambert Lombard’s Liège academy, and they seem to play with the literary tradition around the limitations of painting; these two artists only ever imply the capture of Venus and Mars, never showing it with the explicitness of Heemskerck or Sellaer. The painters who chose to represent the story of Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan all had humanist contacts who could assist by suggesting relevant classical passages, possible interpretations, and occasionally significant pictorial motifs. The unusual iconography Maerten van Heemskerck included in his panel of 1561 almost certainly indicates a collaboration of sorts with his most important intellectual consultant, Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert, a relationship that has been discussed extensively elsewhere.76 It bears emphasizing that Coornhert not only engraved Heemskerck’s prints but collaborated with the artist on the intellectual, allegorical, and classical content of many of his works. By 1561, Coornhert had opened a printing house in Haarlem with Jan van Zuren; Coornhert’s projects included translations of classical literature into the vernacular, and one of the first books to come off his press was his Dutch translation of the first half of Homer’s Odyssey.77 It may be that Heemskerck’s return to the subject of Mars and Venus Surprised in 1561 was connected with this publication, which includes a version of the tale in Book VIII of Homer’s epic poem.78 The exigency of transforming the text into Dutch rhyming verse required Coornhert to expand slightly the narrative and the dialogue, but he remained close to the story as it appeared in the Latin translation of the Greek original from which he was working.79 Heemskerck’s 1561 painting, on the other hand, departs from the Homeric version in one significant detail that was derived from another classical source. In the lower left-hand corner of Heemskerck’s painting is a strange figure with the head of a cock and the body of a man. This figure is unprecedented in Netherlandish versions of the subject, which tend to focus on the moment of capture and shaming, but it was already to be found in Italian prints, where the focus was on the love of Mars and Venus before their discovery.80 The figure, Alectryon, appears in a dialogue by Lucian known as Pliny, Natural History, pp. 316–17. Wolfgang Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art, 1400–1600: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966), pp. 123, 37. 76 Veldman, Maarten van Heemskerck. The chapter on Heemskerck and Coornhert has been updated and reappears as Veldman, ‘“Eloquent Inventions”: Maarten van Heemskerck Inspired by Dirck Volkertsz. Coornhert’, in Images for the Eye and Soul: Function and Meaning in Netherlandish Prints (1450–1650) (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2006), pp. 45–89. 77 D. V. Coornhert, Deerste twaelf boecken Odysseæ, dat is de dolinghe van Vlysse (Haarlem: J. van Zuren, 1561). 78 In his later career, Coornhert vehemently condemned paintings of nude Venuses for their potential to arouse improper erotic desire. See Sluijter, Rembrandt and the Female Nude (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), pp. 144–45. 79 Theodore Weevers, Coornhert’s Dolinghe van Ulysse, de eerste Nederlandsche Odyssee (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1934), pp. 7–37. 80 Stadnichuk identifies two prints from the circle of Giulio Romano. She also refers to one by Giorgio Ghisi where Alectryon has not yet been transformed. See ‘An Unknown “Mars and Venus” by Maarten van Heemskerck’, The Burlington Magazine, 138 (1996), 182–85 (p. 185), esp. n. 11, 12. 74 75

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Gallus. The text tells how Mars asked Alectryon to keep watch for Vulcan while he and Venus went about their affair. Unfortunately, Alectryon fell asleep at his post and, as a result, Sol saw the lovers together as he brought about the dawn. Furious, Mars transformed Alectryon into a cock so that he would forever crow at Sol’s approach (Gall. iii). Heemskerck shows us a hybrid Alectryon, halfway through his metamorphosis but transplanted into a Homeric and Ovidian version of the tale.81 If Heemskerck did not know Lucian’s Gallus directly, it is likely that his periodic collaborators, the Haarlem humanists Coornhert and Junius, could have provided him with the motif, given that both men were clearly familiar with some of Lucian’s other works.82 Heemskerck’s inclusion of Alectryon in his late version of Mars and Venus Surprised synthesized not only multiple classical texts but also some of the issues at stake in the cluster of paintings of the theme. He established the harshly judged and punished sentry as a playfully conceived proxy for the judgement and punishment never meted out to the adulterous couple. Moreover, Heemskerck wittily inserted Alectryon’s mutation into a representation of a story best known from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The instalment of Lucian’s metamorphic character into a scene from Ovid’s poem of love and transformation might have prompted a knowing laugh in an educated viewer and thus a favourable judgement of Heemskerck’s work, despite its transgressive departure from the narrative norms adhered to by Floris, Key, and Sellaer. Like his contemporaries, Heemskerck was competing with the ancients, but rather than engaging with the painters of antiquity via the challenge of the invisible net and the artistic topos of painting the unseen, he vied with the poets. Though the Haarlem artist refused to recapitulate Vulcan’s artistic achievement, he assumed Vulcan’s role in another manner, by orchestrating a scene in which judgement is mollified by laughter, irony, and wit. An artist’s reputation was ultimately tied to his ability to produce works of value and beauty. Vulcan, as master craftsman to the gods, was thus a fitting role model for painters. The products of Vulcan’s forge were indeed splendid and useful: Sol’s chariot, Jupiter’s thunderbolts, Cupid’s bow and arrows, Apollo’s and Diana’s arrows, Mercury’s winged helmet and shoes, Neptune’s trident, Ceres’ sickle. It is no accident that these same elements, which had all become distinguishing attributes, are to be seen in the representations of Mars and Venus Surprised. The gods had benefited from Vulcan’s art, and sixteenth-century painters wanted to cultivate the impression that their works were equally useful to society. Netherlandish culture fostered the creation of attractive artistic products that could facilitate lively and nuanced debate amongst a variety of audiences. This function applies to the literary and dramatic arts, particularly the works of the rederijkers, and it applies to the visual arts as well. Heemskerck, Floris, Key, and Sellaer showcased their chosen medium as a site for discourse, where carefully selected subjects could support a range of overlapping social and artistic concerns. During a period in which Lucian’s rendition of Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan is a curt and Mars-centric retelling, with no mention of the shaming before the other Olympians. 82 Heemskerck’s Momus Criticizing the Gods, also of 1561, relies on another of Lucian’s dialogues, Hermotimus. Junius’s 1565 Emblemata opens with an image of Momus Criticizing the Gods that is similar to Heemskerck’s painting, which has prompted David Cast to see Junius as the source for the artist’s use of the subject and his composition. See David Cast, ‘Marten van Heemskerck’s “Momus Criticizing the Works of the Gods”: A  Problem of Erasmian Iconography’, Simiolus, 7 (1974), 22–34 (p. 29); For Coornhert’s knowledge of Lucian, see Veldman, Maarten van Heemskerck, pp. 87–103. 81

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the painter’s products were coming under increasing scrutiny, a theme like Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan allowed artists to be in dialogue with one another and with sympathetic viewers about their craft. The sudden appearance around 1550 of a dense cluster of these paintings made by the leading Netherlandish artists suggests the value of this subject to an erudite class of viewer with connections to metropolitan Antwerp and its intellectual surrounds.

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Literary Practices: License and its Limits

Fun, Greed, and Popular Culture Lotteries and Lottery-Rhymes as a Mirror of the Cultural Legacy of the Low Countries’ ‘Long Sixteenth Century’ Dick E. H. De Boer University of Groningen

It might require some explanation to clarify why and how lotteries can be considered an important element of the cultural legacy of the transitional period that links medieval and (early) modern times, especially when one thinks of the highly mechanized machinery of greed and hope into which modern lotteries have developed. Yet, based upon the same human inclination, combined with a speculative appeal to God’s mercy — or to Fortune’s whims — and with the excuse of charity or of serving a right cause, the long sixteenth century invented a type of lottery that enhanced the production and reproduction of culture in various ways. The most important peculiarity of the Dutch lotteries of the sixteenth century was the fact that buyers of lottery tickets were increasingly supposed to produce a rhyming text when registering their acquisition of a lottery ticket. And, more generally, literature, the visual arts, and drama were all involved — until around 1620 the lotteries, temporarily, faded away. In the mid-nineteenth century, the first history of lotteries in the Netherlands was written by Gerrit  A. Fokker, who strongly disliked this immoral phenomenon.1 The negative aspects of gambling were also reflected in the literature of the time. Jules Verne devoted his novel Un billet de loterie (1886) to the misery caused by greed.2 Shortly after Fokker, Gilliodts-Van Severen’s studies of the lottery of Bruges offered a more objective approach.3 During the first half of the twentieth century, the history of lotteries in the Low Countries regularly attracted attention, and literary historians started to appreciate the peculiar rhyming tradition that had developed during the sixteenth century.4 Prinsen, in the first decades of the twentieth century, studied part of the rich material on the l­ottery of Leiden Gerrit A. Fokker, Geschiedenis der loterijen in de Nederlanden. Eene bijdrage tot de kennis van de zeden en gewoonten der Nederlanders in de xve, xvie, en xviie eeuwen; met aant., bijl., loterijkrt. en plt. door (Amsterdam: Frederik Muller, 1862). 2 Jules Verne, Un Billet de loterie. Le numéro 9672 (Paris: J.  Hetzel, 1886), which appeared the same year in English translation by Laura E. Kendall as Ticket no. 9672 (Chicago: M. A. Donohue & Co., 1886). 3 Louis Gilliodts-Van Severen, ‘La Loterie à Bruges’, in La Flandre. Revue des monuments d’histoire et d’antiquités (1867–68) i, pp. 5–26, 80–92, 160–95; (1868–69) ii, 408–73; (1669–70) iii, 5–110. See also n. 19. 4 See, for instance, Anne Hallema, ‘Volks- en rederijkerspoëzie bij de 16de-eeuwsche stadsloterijen. De traditie der middeleeuwen handhaaft zich of keert in anderen vorm terug. Een bijdrage tot de cultuurgeschiedenis der stad ‘s-Hertogenbosch’, De Nieuwe Gids, 54  (1939), 304–18. Friedrich  K.  H. Kossmann’s ‘De refereyn- en liedboekjes van de Antwerpsche loterij (1574)’, Het Boek, 11  (1922), 129–40 and Kossmann, ‘Rederijkersgedichten voor de loterij der Sint Jacobskerk te Antwerpen in 1574’, De Gulden Passer, 4 (1926) 1–18 had already introduced this aspect of lotteries to the sphere of cultural history. 1

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 271-294. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114012

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in 1596.5 In the Netherlands, only recently has a range of new publications has started to do justice to the different aspects of lotteries, and of their side-effect: the lottery play.6 In Belgium, the National Lottery of Belgium’s sixtieth anniversary celebration resulted in a 1994 exhibition in the National Archives in Brussels and a book on lotteries in Europe.7 Still, the phenomenon of lotteries in the long sixteenth century is waiting for a major source-edition, which would preferably appear in the form of an online database, in which the textual element of the lottery-rhymes were combined with data from the participants in the lottery: sex, profession, social status, address, and so on. Such a database would not only allow analysis of the dissemination of forms, themes, and motives of popular rhyme culture, but also its social embedding. In addition, it might shed light on still poorly understood ways of communication and education — in particular the role played by different cultural mediators, not only associations like the chambers of rhetoric, but also trade guilds and brotherhoods, neighbourhood associations, and kinship groups, all of which can offer new insights into the formal and informal patterns of cultural dissemination. For such a ‘social history of sixteenth-century poetry’, however, it still is too early. Nevertheless, in this essay some glimpses of it will be shown; in so doing, I will use Piero, the jester of one of the two Leiden chambers of rhetoric, De Witte Acoleye (‘The White Columbine’), as a leitmotif of my argument. Piero, Who Made All of Us Sigh At the end of the sixteenth century, the administrative and literary townscape of Leiden was dominated by its secretary, Jan van Hout. Born in 1542 as the son of Cornelis van Hout, part-time schoolmaster, clerk of the Holy Ghost orphanage, and rhetorician, Jan entered urban service in 1562, at the age of nearly twenty.8 When town secretary Jacob Milde died two years later, Jan van Hout was considered the best candidate for his succession. Soon the turmoil that led to the Dutch Revolt broke out, and Jan went into exile in Emden, East-Frisia — only to return to Holland when the Revolt gained ground. In 1573, he was restored as town secretary and was granted a position as a notary, remaining active in both positions until his death in 1609. For many years, he was also the secretary of the University of Leiden, which was founded in 1575. He meanwhile developed into a model of administrative zeal and literary talent, yet arranged both to be amply remunerated and to practice nepotism to a degree that, even for his times, was excessive. Jacob Prinsen, ‘Rekening van de kosten van het rederijkersfeest te Leiden in 1596’, BMGN, 25 (1904), 444–89. Anneke Huisman and Johan Koppenol, Daer compt de lotery met trommels en trompetten! Loterijen in de Nederlanden tot 1726 (Zeven Provinciën reeks; dl. 3) (Hilversum: Verloren, 1991); and Kitty Kilian, ‘De Haarlemse loterij van 1606– 1607. Loterijen en loterijrijmpjes’, Haerlem. Jaarboek Historische Vereniging Haerlem, 60 (1989–90), 8–37. Jan W. Marsilje, ‘De eerste stadsloterij in Leiden’, in Uit Leidse bron geleverd. Studies over Leiden en de Leidenaren in het verleden, aangeboden aan drs. B.  M. Leverland bij zijn afscheid als adjunct-archivaris van het Leidse Gemeentearchief, ed.  by Marsilje (Leiden: Municipal Archives, 1989), pp. 148–62. 7 Geschiedenis van de loterijen in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden, catalogus bij de gelijknamige tentoonstelling in het Algemeen Rijksarchief van 21 april tot 25 juni 1994, ed. by Ilse Eggers (Catalogus: Algemeen Rijksarchief en Rijksarchief in de Provinciën, Educatieve Dienst, 123) (Brussels: State Archives, 1994); Geschiedenis van de loterijen in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (15de eeuw – 1934), dossier bij de gelijknamige tentoonstelling in het Algemeen Rijksarchief, Brussel, 21 april – 25 juni 1994, ed.  by Lieve De Mecheleer and Maurits Wynants (Dossiers: Algemeen Rijksarchief en Rijksarchief in de Provinciën, Educatieve Dienst, 3de Reeks, 2) (Brussels: State Archives, 1994); and Loterijen in Europa. Vijf eeuwen geschiedenis, ed. by Hans Devisscher (Ghent: Snoeck-Ducaju, [1994]). 8 Karel Bostoen, Hart voor Leiden. Jan van Hout (1542–1609), stadssecretaris, dichter en vernieuwer (Hilversum: Verloren, 2009); and Johan M. Koppenol, Leids heelal. Het Loterijspel (1596) van Jan van Hout (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998), esp. pp. 32–36. 5 6

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One of the family members who profited from Van Hout’s generosity was his nephew Pieter Cornelis van der Mersch (bc  1545, also written as Morsch), who was appointed as one of the four ‘ushers with the rod’ yet did not yet use his artist name.9 Van der Mersch was fired twice for abusing his office (dienst misbruyct) and was saved twice by his cousin. His career as an usher likely started in or shortly before 1578, which is also the year of the first attestation to his activities as a rhetorician. In the same year, he signed a sonnet on the siege and relief of Leyden and presented it in a contest organized by Jan van Hout as L/X/N/Tijt/Bode, representing as an acronym his personal motto ‘Elc sijn tijt’ (Everyone his time).10 Van der Mersch ended his career as an usher in 1597 (after a scandal to which I will return at the end of this essay), but until his death in 1629 he remained the jester of De Witte Acoleye. Jan van Hout may have patronized him in this position as well. Van Hout’s initiative to organize a poetry contest in 1577 and 1578 was the wake-up call for the Leiden rhetoricians, who had led a more or less underground existence since the chamber had been officially closed by the authorities in the troubled years around 1565.11 Van Hout never became a member of any chamber, and even distanced himself from the rhetoricians, yet whenever it suited him he used them as cultural agents. As the jester of De Witte Acoleye, Pieter van der Mersch produced an oeuvre that mainly consists of short occasional verses, such as New Year’s songs, funeral poems, various refrains, and sonnets. He rapidly made a name for himself and chose as his stage name ‘Pi(e) ro(o)’, which offers a puzzling connection with the Pierrot character of comedia dell’arte. The history of the Pierrot character is usually told from the late seventeenth century onwards. However, in 1569 a Pedrolino/Pierrot figure had already been presented on the Italian and French stages, only to be re-invented some seventy-five years later.12 It is seen in the name of the chamber of rhetoricians — Witte Acoleye (or Columbine) — and it is at least an interesting coincidence that Pierrot in comedia dell’arte courts Columbine. This also gives a deeper meaning to Van der Mersch’s artist name: the secretary/jester’s expression of his love for the chamber. The 1596 Leiden Lottery offers additional arguments supporting the theory that Pi(e)ro indeed took his name from comedia dell’arte. Pieter/Piero was a co-organizer of the lottery, responsible for parts of the proceedings, and the organizer of a festival of fools that highlighted the last phase of lottery ticket sales. All chambers of rhetoric were invited to send their jesters on 26 May and to participate in a play written by Van der Mersch, entitled Cort verhael  | van tprincipael  | in Leyden bedreven  | by sotten meest  | die op vrou Lors feest  | waren verschreven (‘Short Story about the Main Festivity, Performed in Leiden, Especially by the Jesters Who Had Appeared at the Party of Lady Lors’). In this play, Van der Mersch appeared as ‘Ioncker Mors’ (‘Squire Messy Person’, after the Dutch word morsig = dirty, but with an allusion to the Latin mors = death) who would marry ‘Lady Lors’, the personification of cunning and deceit. In the lottery registers we find Van der Mersch mentioned in a remarkable way. When buying nine lots, a participant in the lottery, N. B. Weesp, produced the following verse:13 Johan M. Koppenol, ‘Pieter Cornelisz van der Mersch en de ingekeerde Leidse rederijkerij’, in Conformisten en rebellen. Rederijkerscultuur in de Nederlanden (1400–1650), ed.  by Bart  A.  M. Ramakers (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), pp. 228–39. Many details about Pieter van der Mersch were brought together by Anneke M. Mulder in her unpublished master’s thesis, ‘L. X.N. Tyt’ (unpublished master’s thesis, University Leiden, 1992). The usher with the rod was the urban official who, as servant of the municipal authorities, carried a rod symbolizing judicial authority. 10 Municipal Archives Leiden, Library, Inv.nr. 2006f, sources regarding siege and relief. 11 Koppenol, Leids Heelal, pp. 110–18. 12 Robert F. Storey, Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 13 Municipal Archives Leiden, Gasthuisarchief, inv.nr. 429 nr. 19685. 9

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Fig. 1: Detail from entry no. 19685 in the Leiden lottery of 1596, by lot-buyer N.B. Weesp, with a short verse on Piero, indicated by the Greek letters Pi and Rho, and a drawing of the Grim Reaper (Municipal Archives Leiden, Gasthuisarchief, inv.no. 429; photo by the author)

Druck in vreucht alhier verkeert is (Distress has changed in festive pleasure Nu Pieroo diet al deed suchten As Piero, who made all of us sigh, De gheen is door wyen hier vreucht vermeert is Is he who made joy go out of measure En’t volck vermaect heeft met zotte cluchten And who amused the people with foolish play)

Here the author proves he knows both sides of the Leiden Pieter/Piero, usher and jester, a man with a split identity and double character: as usher, most times confronting citizens with their problems (bankruptcy, taxes in arrears, seizures), and, as jester, producing joy. Weesp even went a step further: to indicate Piero, he wrote the name of Leiden’s usher-­ jester using only the Greek letters Pi and Rho, and added a drawing of the grim reaper. The grim reaper is significant because it was linked — at least in Dutch Punch and Judy tradition — to the ‘Death of Pierala’. This is the sad version of Pierrot that evolved from an old oral tradition, also dating back to the early sixteenth century, about a Till Eulenspiegel-like character who engages in a lot of tomfoolery, hides in a coffin, and ultimately rises out of it as death himself. These examples clearly show that shortly before 1600 these European archetypes were known and employed in Leiden in the context of lotteries.14 Let us therefore look more closely at the lotteries themselves. The Origins of Lotteries in the Low Countries Lotteries are neither a medieval nor a Dutch invention, and all kinds of varieties of gambling and plays of fortune have existed more or less since the origin of mankind.15 In the late Middle Ages across Europe, however, the wheel of fortune took a new turn, and competing In his article, Johan Koppenol, ‘Het zakboekje van Piero: profiel van een rederijker’, an e-publication on a manuscript in the Leiden archives (available online at www.neerlandistiek.nl/04/03) contains numerous songs, among them at least twenty-six songs by Van der Mersch, Koppenol still casts doubt upon the relation between this artist name and the Pierrot character. 15 For a short introduction, see Dick E.  H.  de Boer, ‘Lotteries and Lottery-Rhymes as an Element of Popular Culture in the Low Countries, 1440–1640’, in The Low Countries: Crossroads of Cultures, ed. by Ton Broos, Margriet Bruyn Lacy, and Thomas F. Shannon (Münster: Nodus, 2005), pp. 57–76; and Robert Muchembled, ‘Het Rad van Fortuin. Loterijen en moderniteit in Europa van de 15de tot de 17de eeuw’, in Devisscher, Loterijen in Europa, pp. 17–54. A helpful survey is in Huijsmand and Koppenol, Daer compt de lotery, pp. 10–21. 14

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for offices — or for material prizes (money and goods) — came to be organized as a lottery. Differently from what one might expect given the fame of Italian lotteries, the lottery in this new shape was (re)invented in the Low Countries. It was rooted in the practice of selling urban offices to the highest bidder. During the fourteenth century, the authorities had already become aware that it was possible to raise more money by selling lottery tickets and granting the office through a draw (after which the winner could of course sell the office). This was done, for instance in Bruges, both for allocating places on the market, and for appointing the official urban carriers, with a restricted number of qualified participants.16 In 1441, an important step was taken when it was decided to stimulate participation by widening the circle of eligible players and by increasing the attraction of the lotteries through the addition of money prizes. This was an immediate success. Other towns rapidly started to imitate the Bruges example, and soon both the goals and the prizes changed. The lotteries became an important means of financing special projects and the prizes started to vary from cash and annuities to actual objects (mainly in silver). Within a few years, towns like Sluis, Leuven, and Oudenaarde in the Southern Low Countries organized lotteries to finance the (re)construction of their urban fortifications and the repayment of their urban deficits. Utrecht was the first city in the Northern Low Countries to follow suit. The success of public lotteries was immediately imitated by private organizers, who set up lotteries ‘huerre singulair proffijt sueckende’ (‘to make their own profit’) using ‘subtile bedriechnisse’ (‘forms of subtle deceit’), in the words of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy when he tried to check the proliferation of the ‘wild’ lotteries in 1445.17 In the early sixteenth century, the towns in Holland followed the examples of Flanders and Brabant: Haarlem in 1503, Leiden in 1504, and both towns again in 1506 tried to solve the problem of town bankruptcy — which they had previously fought by selling annuities and per-capita taxation, to no effect — in this way. The coming of the Reformation in 1517, sparked by the publication of Luther’s protests against the selling of indulgences — in particular those sold to finance the new Church of Saint Peter in Rome — quickly led to a collapse of financing for the maintenance and renovation of churches, the addition of chapels, the production of altarpieces, and so on.18 The financial crisis that followed demanded a transformation of lottery goals: churches and religious institutions became the organizations that benefited most from the organization of lotteries, second only to archery guilds and schools.19 An interesting witness of this support for ecclesiastical architecture is the poster or chaerte produced to advertise the lottery of 1558, which was to finance the raising of the clerestory of the Church of Gilliodts-Van Severen, ‘La loterie’, 2, pp. 461–62, and 3, pp. 9–11. Fokker, Geschiedenis, p. 14. Examples are in Gerrit Verhoeven, Devotie en negotie. Delft als bedevaartplaats in de late middeleeuwen (Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Press, 1992) pp.  180–92. Cf.  Wim Vroom, De financiering van de kathedraalbouw in de middeleeuwen; in het bijzonder van de Dom in Utrecht (Maarssen: Gary Schwartz, 1981), translated as Financing Cathedral Building in the Middle Ages: The Generosity of the Faithful, trans. by Elizabeth Manton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2010) for the effect of the Reformation on the financing of church building. 19 The most famous lotteries supporting a school were those held for the Bogaerdenschool in Bruges in 1549 and 1574 — the poster advertising the lottery in the latter year provides a clear image of both the lottery’s goal and its prizes. See Louis Gilliodts-Van Severen, ‘Une Carte de la loterie brugeoise de 1574’, La Flandre, 9 (1878), 9–18; Willy Dezutter, ‘De loterijen van 1549 en 1574 ten voordele van de Bogardenschool’, in 125 Jaar Stedelijke Nijverheidsschool, ed. by Dezutter and Marc Goetinck (Brugge: Stedelijk Museum voor Volkskunde, 1979). 16 17 18

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Fig. 2: Lottery `Card’ of the 1558 Lottery for the Construction of the Choir of the Old or St Nicolas Church in Amsterdam. Woodcut (collection Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap, Amsterdam; photo Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

Saint Nicolas in Amsterdam (Figure 2).20 Among the most active lottery organizers were the church masters of the Church of Saint Jacob in Antwerp, who between 1518 and 1574 organized four lotteries. Quite contrary to Luther’s message, in the Antwerp lottery of 1524, you could even win indulgences. In 1574, a literary competition that was organized as an accompaniment to the lottery led to the publication of the first refrein booklet, which shows examples of lottery rhymes.21 Here the involvement of the urban rhetoricians in an early phase of the development of lotteries becomes apparent, if only since the rhetoricians’ stages could be used for the public drawings. Around 1560, the goal of the lotteries changed once more. Deteriorating economic and social conditions caused authorities to look for new means to finance social and medical care for the growing and increasingly impoverished town population. Consequently, between 1560 and 1620, hospitals, orphanages, and institutions for the elderly were the main beneficiaries of the financial gains provided by lotteries. Despite more stringent regulations obliging every organizer of a lottery to apply for a letter patent (1526, 1561), ‘wild’ Herman Janse, De Oude Kerk te Amsterdam. Bouwgeschiedenis en restauratie (Zwolle: Waanders; Zeist: Rijksdienst voor de Monumentenzorg, 2004), esp. pp. 133, 135, 223. 21 See above n. 4 and Anne-Laure van Bruaene, Om beters wille. Rederijkerskamers en de stedelijke cultuur in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (1400–1650) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008). 20

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or ‘secret’ lotteries kept growing in numbers.22 In Antwerp alone in 1568 — the year of the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt — at least seventeen unauthorized lotteries were reported.23 In the sixteenth century, some villages also started to organize their own lotteries, but these remained mainly an urban phenomenon until 1620.24 Success: Problems and Solutions The success of the lotteries was immense. Whereas the old lotteries (for offices) had had only a few dozen participants and perhaps several hundreds of lots sold, numbers rose exponentially once lotteries were turned into public festivities that offered everyone access to the dream of good fortune. Gradually a lottery infrastructure developed — one that could be called upon every time a public lottery was organized anywhere in the Low Countries. A network of points of sale was also created, mostly in taverns, where lot-buyers were registered and prize-winners were announced. Many hundreds (and often several thousands) of lottery posters were printed for each lottery to advertise the goals and the prizes. This facilitated lot-buyers’ participation in lotteries in a town or village other than their own. Of course, the explicit appeal to lot-buyers’ civic or charitable duty (their obligation as good citizens to support a town in need, a church in decay, or fellow citizens in distress) was invoked as the motive for every lottery, but simple greed dominated; even calculated investment and risk-taking may have been involved.25 Given that the chance to win a prize — dependent on the number of prefabricated prizes and actual lots sold — seems to have varied between 0.25 and 1.25 per cent,26 it required a great deal of optimism as well as careful calculation to turn chance into well-balanced risk. In any case, the several hundreds of lots sold in the early fifteenth century became tens of thousands in the early sixteenth century and more than 300,000 in the early seventeenth century, when a Haarlem lottery sold 308,047 lots.27 This success had a delicate side, however. Due to the very peculiar — one even could call it clumsy — practice of drawing the lottery tickets, the drawings took an increasing number of days — even weeks. The reason for this was a legal argument: all lottery tickets were equal, and consequently all sold tickets had to be drawn. This meant that for every registered lot an individual ticket was written; this ticket mentioned the coordinates of the buyer: name, domicile (often the name of the house where the lot-buyer was living — or of a house nearby — as well as a street, and town or village), and sometimes even his or her profession. These tickets were put into containers out of which they were then drawn. In another set of containers an equivalent number of counter-tickets was put; some of them mentioned a prize, but the great majority simply said nyet (nothing). At the drawing a ticket was taken out of the first set of baskets Gilliodts-Van Severen, ‘La loterie’, 3 (1869–70), p. 83. Herman van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market and the European Economy (Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries) (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1963), iii, p. 363. 24 The first documented village in Holland to organize a lottery was the urbanized residential village of The Hague, where in 1580 the archers were permitted a lottery; this was followed by a lottery in Zandvoort in 1596 to rebuild a church that had been destroyed by a fire, and again in The Hague, where in 1600 the orphanage was supported through a lottery. 25 For a later period, see Anne  L. Murphy, ‘Lotteries in the 1690s: Investment or Gamble?’, Financial History Review, 12 (2005), 227–46. A research project entitled ‘The Lure of Lady Luck: Lotteries and Economic Culture in the Fifteenthand Sixteenth-Century Low Countries’ by Jeroen Puttevils of Antwerp University, starting October 2013, investigates this possibility. 26 Estimation based upon the lotteries of Leiden, Den Bosch, and Haarlem. 27 Kilian, ‘De Haarlemse Loterij’. 22 23

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by a trecker (‘drawer’, i.e. the person who drew the tickets), it was unfolded, and the data on it were read aloud by a leser (‘reader’), then a counter-ticket was likewise drawn and read aloud. Since the overwhelming majority of counter-tickets read nyet, this last official was called the nyet-rouper (‘he who shouts “nothing”’). When done in such a way, one could draw a maximum of 5760 to 7000 lots in one non-stop twenty-four hour drawing session. This meant that by around 1500 the lottery draw tended to become a long-winded ceremony that wore down the joys and expectations of fortune. The rational solution would have been either restricting the draw to just drawing prizes (with a climax towards the highest prize), or — as was done in Italian lotteries — taking a mathematical approach, in which winning lot numbers were drawn. The ‘Dutch solution’, however, was different: the egalitarian principle being sacrosanct, the only option was to increase the value — not the number — of prizes and to enliven the ceremony by adding elements of entertainment. Thanks to the popularity of lotteries, the prizes stimulated the craft of gold-andsilver-forging. A provisional inventory of urban lotteries during the sixteenth century shows that over 100 of them were officially authorized and organized. With a rough average of some 600 prizes executed mainly in silver — varying from silver spoons to crosses and from brandy-tasters to cups and plates, some of them gilded but rarely entirely in gold — the lotteries must have brought at least 60,000 objects made of precious metals into circulation. Sooner or later, many of them were likely melted, sold as bullion, or reshaped, but there can be no doubt that the lotteries contributed to Netherlandish material culture by providing work for artisans and by keeping the dream of prosperity and civilization alive. And of course, the production of lottery posters promoted the development of a new genre of images and printing. In this article I focus on another aspect of the cultural impact of the lottery tradition, namely its connections with urban spectacle and literary production. Lotteries developed into literary feasts, not only because a rhetorician festival was often held before the start of the drawing, but also because lot-buyers were encouraged to write brief texts — so-called prozen — to be registered with their lottery tickets. Increasingly, lesers began to read these prozen instead of dry administrative data. Around 1500, the custom had been established to offer lot-buyers the choice between a saying, a proverb, a motto (mostly ­called devijs or a(d)vijs), or a verse or rhyme. Examples of prozen from the early sixteenth century show that at that moment only between 10 and 20 per cent of were composed as rhyming texts, whereas around 1600 the share of verses of any kind had risen to between 80 and 90 per cent. This graph (Figure 3) shows a model of the growing share of rhyming prozen — a trend which can only be understood properly with the recognition that many proverbs (and even mottos) had rhyming texts. The rapid growth of the number of lots sold, and the concurrent change from data to verse must have resulted in a marked change around the middle of the sixteenth century. A few examples may illustrate this change. The Leiden lottery of 1504 sold c. 40,510 lottery tickets, for which the buyers produced c. 10 per cent rhyming prozen that were read during the approximately eleven days of the draw (about twenty-three seconds per ticket-drawing).28 In the year 1522, the town chronicler of Den Bosch, 28

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Marsilje, ‘Eerste stadsloterij’.

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urban ­secretary Peter van Os, wrote that the lottery draw started on ‘sinte Petersavont ad vincula’ (1 August) and lasted ‘totten XIXen dach wesende dynsdach der maent augusti dien dach uuyt totter middernacht toe’ (until the 19th day, being Tuesday, of the month of August, the end of the day, towards midnight).29 If we assume an average of twenty seconds per draw during the eighteen days and eight hours of the drawing, this means that almost 80,000 lottery tickets may have been sold in this particular lottery. This explains the optimism of the authorities in Den Bosch who, when they organized another lottery in 1563 (to be drawn in 1564), their ambition was to sell 175,000 lottery tickets. When sel- Fig. 3: Model of development of the size of lotteries and the share of rhyming `prozen’. ling period ended, however, only A = numbers of lots sold per lottery c.  75,000 tickets were sold.30 The B = numbers of non-rhyming prozen drawing started on 14 July 1564 and lasted until 31 July. Since it took just over seventeen days in this case, each draw must have lasted under twenty seconds. The cursory nature of the Bosch registers makes it difficult to judge accurately the 9338 prozen contributed by the lot-buyers,31 since many of them seem to have been registered just by their first line, but the share of rhyming prozen was certainly over 50 per cent. Finally, the Leiden lottery of 1596 sold 281,232 lots, of which approximately 85 to 90 per cent were provided with rhyming texts. This drawing started on 1 August 1596 at noon and lasted until 22 September at eight in the morning: fifty-two days and twenty hours, and just over sixteen seconds per ticket drawn.32 Of course it was essential that, during the drawing, the texts were read loudly and clearly to avoid any misunderstanding. The regulations of the Leiden lottery stated that the lesers should be declamatory specialists, who ‘den prosen naer behoiren ende ghelijc Kroniek van Peter van Os.  Geschiedenis van ’s-Hertogenbosch en Brabant van Adam tot 1523, ed.  by Annemarie van Lith-Droogleever Fortuijn, Jan G. M. Sanders, and Geertrui A. M. Van Synghel (The Hague: Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 1996), p. 348. 30 Godfried C. M. van Dijck, De Bossche Loterij 1562–1564 (Sermoyer: Le Meix 2003), p. 17, mentions a total of 73,646 lottery tickets. However, in Van Dijck, De Bossche Loterij, p. 275, in the financial account of the lottery that appears as an appendix, several people are paid for writing ‘74646 prosen, dichten ende namen ende noch 626 prysen’ (‘74646 prosen, verses, and names, and another 626 prizes’), which would bring the total to 75,272. 31 An average participant thus bought 7.88 tickets; if one disregards the 7,262 tickets bought by the Antwerp citizen Mr. Jacob Bruynincx (Van Dijck, De Bossche Loterij, p. 11), a purchase that disproportionally influences the average upwards, the average is just over 7 tickets per person. 32 De Boer, ‘Trecker, treckt met goe couragie’. Een systematische uitgave van het trekkingsregister van de Leidse loterij van 1596 (internal publication, RULeiden, 1989), pp. 5–8. 29

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hem de selve deur den trecker werden ghelevert, zullen lesen ende pronunchieren’ (‘have to read and pronounce the prozen properly and in the way [the prozen] are handed over to them by the “drawer”’). It is not surprising to find rhetoricians among the readers and nyet-roupers in 1596, one of them being the already mentioned rhetorician and jester Piero. Due to the meaningful involvement of rhetoricians, not only the festival and play before the start of the lottery, but also the drawing itself could develop into a theatre for moral education. Civic (Dis)obedience With their appeal to the public to support towns, churches, schools, and charitable institutions, the authorities emphasized corporate behaviour and civic obedience. This was clearly expressed when the Estates of Holland granted permission to the town of Schiedam to organize a lottery in support of its orphanage and the local chamber of rhetoric, the Roo Roosen (‘Red Roses’), organized a contest with the motto ‘Wat t’noodichst is om d’arme Weesen t’onderhouwen’ (‘What is most necessary to support the poor orphans’) in July 1603.33 A song written by the jester Piero has been preserved in a manuscript from the Leiden chamber of rhetoric De Witte Acoleye:34 Nieu liedt ter eeren de loterije van Schiedam anno 1603 Op de wijzen ‘U lieffde quelt mij totter doot’.35 Godts zegen maeckt rijck, in overvloet, Die desolaet soucken te heelen Hun schadt ten hemel wel dubbelt winnen moet So wie doet nae Goods beveelen Om de weeskens milt te deelen. Het weeshuijs hier bout met wijsen raet Goede opsicht wilt ordineren ’t Is zo Gods bevel en ampt der magistraet Wel te letten opt regeren Op dat weeskens Gods naem eeren  || Toch met milder hant wilt doen het best om spijsen de arme weesen. ’t Ongemaeckte huijs noch vrij wat veel aen rest Dies de bijstandt wordt gepresen voorden prijs noch uijt te lesen. Deur oorloch en Pest oft ander noot Daer Godt de Heer mee doet castijen Arjan van Dixhoorn, Lustige geesten. Rederijkers in de Noordelijke Nederlanden (1480–1650) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), pp. 84, 181, 254; Koppenol, ‘Pieter Cornelisz van der Mersch’, pp. 232–34; and Koppenol, Leids heelal, pp. 383–84. 34 Leiden, Municipal Archives, Gildenarchieven, inv.nr. 1473, fol. 27v–28v. 35 Melody taken from a popular love-complaint, which between 1589 and the early seventeenth century is documented in 7 sources, and was used for at least 48 other songs. See the Dutch Song Database, produced by the Amsterdam P.J.  Meertensinstitute and available at http://www.liederenbank.nl/liedpresentatie.php?zoek=14701&lan=nl and http:// www.liederenbank.nl/resultaatlijst.php?zoek=48902&actie=incipitnorm&lan=nl [accessed 2 November 2016]. 33

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Zo wort de meenicht van weeskinderen groot ’t weeshuijs heeft al veel te lijen Dan Godt laet, gebenedijen. Prince Prince, Godt aensiet de joncheijt cleijn Haer ouderen in zee verlooren  || caritaet bewijs, zo doet uijt harten reijn Laet met geen trompetten hooren U inleggen van te vooren Finis L.x.N. tijt Piero Den VIIIen Julij 1603 Per Schiedam New song in honour of the lottery of Schiedam, anno 1603 To the melody ‘Your love torments me to death’ God’s blessing enriches in abundance those who aim to heal misery. Their treasure must double in heaven. The same to he who follows God’s orders to endow gently the orphans. The orphanage builds here on good advice. Please, command good supervision, as it is God’s command and the task of the magistracy to mind well their governing [and] to make the orphans honour God’s name. Surely, please do gently your best to nourish the poor orphans. The unbuilt house still lacks a lot, thus any support will be praised, even before the prize is read aloud. Through war, pestilence, or other need by which God our Lord chastises us the number of orphans grows high. The orphanage already suffers a lot. So, God, let it be blessed. Prince Prince, God, cast your eye upon the little children whose parents are lost at sea. Show charity, and from a pure heart. Do not make heard by trumpets 281

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your stake beforehand. The end Everyone his time Piero The 8th of July 1603 At Schiedam

Thus, the usher-jester eloquently emphasized everyone’s charitable duty to support the construction of an orphanage. Modesty, charity, and good faith were the keywords of civic obedience. The success of the lotteries results, to a certain degree, from the success of this moral approach. Yet the public did not behave entirely according to the authorities’ wishes. It was necessary to constantly repeat the rule that libellous, rabble-rousing, and obscene prozen were prohibited, but it remained an idle hope that such prohibitions would stop writers from producing texts that either directly or indirectly broke the rules and offended the ears and hearts of the urban authorities.36 Although there was a majority of politically correct prozen in which lot-buyers expressed their hopes and good intentions, a large minority contains anti-clerical, rebellious, obscene, or insulting messages. These often play on the fact that more than 98 per cent of the texts, when read, were followed by a loudly and clearly shouted ‘Nothing!’. The rhyming rhetorical question ‘Nu segt my trecker, wat zout ghy seggen  | off ghy nu thuys quaemt ende zaecht eenen paep op u wyff liggen’ (‘Now, tell me, drawer, what would you say  | if you were to come home to see a priest lying with your wife?’) is in itself a complaint against the sexual behaviour of clerics, but when followed by ‘nyet’, it has a comical effect.37 The proze stating ‘Quisquis? Menich man meynt dat zyn vader doot is  | mair hy state aenden outaer ende doet mis’ (‘Who? Many a man thinks his father to be dead  | but he stands at the altar and celebrates Mass’) is equally anti-clerical.38 A proze that in 1564 asked, in a seemingly innocent way, what the supporters of the new bishop of Den Bosch would gain, has anti-clerical implications as well: ‘Wat sullen hebben de trewanten, die cussen des biscops wanten’ (‘What shall the henchmen have, who kiss the bishop’s gloves?’). Another bluntly asked ‘Wat heft den Shairtoigenbosch misdaen dat hy den biscop heeft moeten ontfaen’ (‘What wrong has the town of Den Bosch done, to be forced to receive this bishop?’).39 In both cases, the political statement had added force because of the powerful nyet that followed, and for which the authors could easily claim innocence. These and several other prozen were directed against Frans van de Velde, who was born in 1506 in the Brabant village of Son, and was later known as Franciscus Sonnius. SonThese subversive prozes are clearly part of the phenomenon of subversive speech and writing that has recently drawn attention. See Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, ‘“A Bad Chicken was Brooding”: Subversive Speech in Late Medieval Flanders’, Past and Present, 214 (2012), 45–86. 37 Van Dijck, De Bossche Loterij, p. 191, no. 7321. Almost identical is p. 86, no. 3210, addressing the ‘nyet-rouper’. And again, with an exhortation to the reader of the lottery ticket: ‘Wat sou die leser seggen oft hy die paep op zyn wyff zaech liggen’, p. 133, no. 5068. 38 Van Dijck, De Bossche Loterij, p. 102, no. 3840. 39 Van Dijck, De Bossche Loterij, p. 82, no. 3090 and p. 98, no. 3685. 36

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nius made a career as professor at the University of Leuven, and from 1549 onwards was an inquisitor of Holland, Zeeland, and Frisia. In 1547, he actively participated in the Council of Trent. When he helped to design a diocesan reorganization of the Low Countries, and made himself the first bishop of Den Bosch, he faced an unkind reception when trying to install himself in 1562.40 There even circulated a mock Lord’s Prayer expressing the local discontent: O bisschop Sonnius, die ten Bosch zijt, Uwen name is zeer benijd. Uw rijk is van geender weerden In hemelrijk noch op eerden. Gij eet huiden ons dagelijks brood; Ons wijfs ende kinderen hebbent groot nood. O Heer, Gij, die daar in den hemel zijt, Maakt ons doch dezen bisschop met zijn inzettinge kwijt En laat ons in egeen bekoringe vallen, Maar verlost ons van de geschoren allen. Amen. O bishop Sonnius who is in Den Bosch taunted be your name. Your kingdom has no value Neither in heaven nor on earth You eat this day our daily bread, Of which our wives and children are in severe need. Oh Lord, who is in heaven, Free us from this bishop and his ordinances, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from all tonsured. Amen.41

This was sheer blasphemy, as — in fact — were many prozen. During the growing discontent on the eve of the Dutch Revolt the lottery rhymes were an unmistakable sign of the changing tide. The authorities could only repeat the prohibitions and express their concern. That, at least, is what Governor Margaret of Parma did in 1564 when she heard about the ‘scandaleuse ende kettersche prosen’ (‘scandalous and heretical prozen’) that had been produced the year before, when Delft had organized a lottery to support the local hospital.42 One of the very popular prozen that was read in Delft — and that obviously annoyed the Governor — stated:

Encyclopedie van Noord-Brabant, ed. by Anton van Oirschot and others (Baarn; Market books, 1986), iv, pp. 82–83; and Ludovicus J. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme in Noord-Nederland in de 16e en de 17e eeuw (3 vols), 2nd edn (Amsterdam: Urbi et orbi, 1947), pp. 348 ff. 41 Rogier, Geschiedenis, p. 359. 42 De stad Delft, Cultuur en Maatschappij tot 1572, ed. by Ineke V. T. Spaander (Delft: Stedelijk Museum het Prinsenhof, 1979), pp. 108 ff. 40

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43

Als de vincken Sitten en quincken Opt velt Soe staen die paepe Ant outaer en gaepen Naert offergelt.43

‘Just like the finches are sitting and chatting in the field likewise the priests stand at the altar, gazing at the offertory money’

However, neither annoyance nor anger could stop many people from expressing a deeply rooted and widely spread anti-clericalism. In Den Bosch, this same proze was produced several times, with variations, by participants who bought their lottery tickets in Antwerp, Brussels, and Den Bosch itself.44 Yet the great majority remained faithful to the traditional Church and its doctrine of charity. Some prozen even explicitly criticized Reformed thought: ‘Die den oude wech laet  | ende den nyeuwen gaet  | wair zall hy hem vynden in den lesten staet’ (‘He who leaves the old course and follows the new one, where will he find himself in the last state?’).45 On the other hand, a devout proverb like ‘Soe Godt gevoecht, my genoecht’ (‘How it shall please God, will satisfy me’), produced dozens of times in the Den Bosch lottery, had a double sense because of the shouted nyet.46 Textual Tradition and Moral Education The examples above illustrate that, long before the Antwerp refrain booklet of 1574, a lottery repertoire developed and circulated. Indeed, in the later lotteries of Leiden and Haarlem, for example, we find many of the early texts again, still functioning in a society that in the meantime had lost — at least in the rebel counties — its predominantly Catholic character. As indicated above, this textual tradition was partly rooted in rhyming proverbs, an old genre that still remains poorly explored.47 This is all the more striking since proverbs are the condensation of an essential half-conscious layer of cultural identity found in manuscript illuminations and paintings (with Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Dutch Proverbs of 1559

Huisman and Koppenol, Daer compt, p. 96. Van Dijck, De Bossche Loterij, pp. 11, 93, 94, 128, 130, 204, nos 405, 3466, 3519, 4826, 4927 and 7925. Some of them were only registered with the first line. 45 Van Dijck, De Bossche Loterij, p. 208, no. 8066. 46 This fits with the image of sixteenth-century religious diversity that has been the subject of many recent studies, see Guido Marnef, ‘Multiconfessionalism in a Commercial Metropolis: The case of 16th-Century Antwerp’, in A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World, ed. by Thomas Max Safley (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 75–97; Marnef ‘Chambers of Rhetoric and the Transmission of Religious Ideas in the Low Countries’, in Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe: Volume 1. Religion and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700, ed.  by Heinz Schilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 274–93; and Religie, hervorming en controverse in de zestiende-eeuwse Nederlanden, ed. by Violet Soen and Paul Knevel, Publicaties van de Vlaams-Nederlandse Vereniging voor Nieuwe Geschiedenis: 12 (Maastricht: Shaker Publishing, 2013). 47 In the mid-1990s, however, a renewed interest in the topic can be seen in Wim van Anrooij and Thom Mertens, ‘“Een cort jolijt”. Middelnederlandse spreukstrofen met het rijmschema aabccb’, in Een zoet akkoord. Middeleeuwse lyriek in de Lage Landen, ed. by Frank Willaert and others, Nederlandse literatuur en cultuur in de middeleeuwen: 7 (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1992), pp.  219–33, 392–99; and Herman Brinkman, ‘“Alder wysheit fondament.” Profane ethiek in enige verzamelingen Middelnederlandse rijmspreuken’, in Wat is wijsheid? Lekenethiek in de Middelnederlandse letterkunde, ed.  by Joris Reynaert and others, Nederlandse literatuur en cultuur in de middeleeuwen: 9 (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1994), pp.  230–45. Of course, proverbs are a central theme in Herman Pleij, Het gevleugelde woord. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur 1400–1560 (Bert Bakker: Amsterdam, 2007). A research proposal for a digitized repertory of Middle Dutch Rhyming Proverbs by Greet Jungman and Annette Hemmes, which in 2012 won the gold medal of Teylers Tweede Genootschap, is an important next step towards more detailed study. 43 44

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as the oft-copied archetype),48 but also in many literary texts — as elements that enhance the listener’s involvement, or serve as aides-mémoire — and as textual stop-gaps in all manner of manuscripts, both administrative and narrative. Around 1400, the freelance poet Willem van Hildegaersberch often used proverbs in his work, and a proverb-collection was added at the end of the primary extant manuscript of his poems.49 Lottery registers are a rich source for these proverbs. The repeatedly employed ‘Ick werp eenen spierinck vuyt om een cabellau te vangen’ (‘I throw a smelt to catch a codfish’),50 is still used unchanged in modern Dutch and is the ideogram of the National Lottery. The modern Dutch saying ‘je weet nooit hoe een koe een haas vangt’ (‘You never know how a cow may catch a hare’), meaning that something unexpected can always happen, finds its equivalent in 1596 in Leiden, where a certain Claes de Haes, living in Amsterdam in a street called the Niesel, was fortunate to win a silver spoon after his proze was read. It was a proverb and a pun on his name: ‘Tis misselic waer de koe een haes vangt’ (‘It is highly improbable that a cow catches a hare’, with ‘misselic’ meaning ‘uncertain, easy to be missed’).51 Many proverbs were also turned into texts on walls and floors, inscribed on ornamented slabs and tiles. A good example of this pluriform tradition is: ‘Die tijt es cort die doot is snel  | Wachtu van sonden soe doedi wel’ (‘Time is short; death comes fast  | refrain from sins; then you do well’), which is known (almost) unchanged from at least eight manuscripts, and in adapted form from many other text-carriers showing that the memento mori message was omnipresent in late medieval and early modern culture, linking the world of the Modern Devotion to that of the Reformation.52 In the Den Bosch lottery, this proverb was mentioned at least once in an abbreviated form,53 and in the 1596 lottery of Leiden we find it dozens of times. Floor tiles with the same text, each containing two quadrants of a circle, are found all over the Low Countries (Figure 4). Glazed tiles, dated early sixteenth century, found at excavations in the Gouda town centre, and the former castle Spangen near Rotterdam; picture composed by the author, using images from different tiles, together reading ‘Die tijt is cort  | die doot es snel  | wacht u van sonden  | soe doedi wel’.

For proverbs and marginalia see Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs and the Borders of a Flemish Book of Hours’, in Manuscripten en miniaturen: Studies aangeboden aan Anne S. Korteweg bij haar afscheid van de Koninklijke Bibliotheek, ed. by Jos Biemans and others (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2007), pp. 321 ff. The literature on Bruegel is abundant. Most relevant here are Alan Dundes and Claudia A. Stibbe, The Art of Mixing Metaphors: A Folkloristic Interpretation of the Netherlandish Proverbs by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1981); and Mark  A. Meadow, Peter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs and the Practice of Rhetoric (Zwolle: Waanders, 2002). 49 Willem van Hildegaersberch, Gedichten, ed. by Willem Bisschop and Eelco Verwijs (Utrecht: H&S Publishers, 1981; photomechanical reprint edition 1870), pp. 253–56, collection of 118 rhyming proverbs. For an example of a proverb from his text, see below. Nevertheless, Theo Meder, Sprookspreker in Holland. Leven en werk van Willem van Hildegaersberch (ca. 1400) (Amsterdam: Prometheus 1991), still thought it appropriate not to include proverbs in his analysis. 50 E.g. Van Dijck, De Bossche Loterij, p. 46, no. 1707. 51 Leiden, Municipal Archives, Gasthuisarchief, nr. 426, register of the drawing of the lottery, fol. 78v, nr. 1507. 52 Herman Mulder, ‘Middelnederlandse rijmspreuken: iets over vloertegels, doodkisten en Latijnse voorbeelden’, Queeste, 11 (2004), 44–55, esp. 47 ff. Among his material, however, lottery registers are lacking. Jan W. M. de Jong and others, Thuis in de late middeleeuwen. Het Nederlands burgerinterieur 1400–1535. Tentoonstellingscatalogus Provinciaal Overijssels Museum (Zwolle: Waanders, 1980), p. 95. 53 Van Dijck, De Bossche Loterij, p. 64, no. 2385: ‘die tyt is cort, de doot is snel’. 48

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Fig. 4: Glazed floor tiles, dated early 16th c., found at the excavations in the Gouda town centre and at the former castle Spangen near Rotterdam. Picture composed by the author, using images from different tiles, together reading ‘Die tijt is cort | die doot es snel | wacht u van sonden | soe doedi wel’. (Museum Rotterdam inv. nos. 768 and 769)

References to the biblical King Solomon are equally abundant. Joris Reynaerts has pointed out the popularity of these sayings in describing the Proverbia Salomonis.54 It is striking to find the last verses of Willem van Hildegaersberch’s poem ‘Salomoens woert’, written around 139655 — ‘Want blyde te sijn ende wel te doen  | Dat prijsde coninc Salomon’ (‘Since to be happy and to do good  | Was praised by king Solomon’) — perfectly echoed in 1596 by Jan Dircxz, spoonmaker, living in Amsterdam behind the Old Church (Saint Nicholas Church) next to the brewery De Roos, who won a silver spoon after his proze was

Joris Reynaert, ‘Alderhande proverbien vanden wisen Salomone’, in Klein kapitaal uit het handschrift-Van Hulthem, ed. by Hans van Dijk and others (Hilversum: Verloren, 1992), pp. 153–63. 55 Bisschop and Verwijs, Willem van Hildegaersberch, pp. 222–23. 54

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read: ‘Vrolick te wesen en wel te doen, is den leere van Salomon’ (‘To be joyful and to do well is the doctrine of Solomon’).56 This shows how rich the possibilities of the lottery corpus are. Originality, Politics, and Culture Besides the great majority of prozen coming from this growing corpus of .discourse, or the personal circumstances of their ‘authors’. Tracing these prozen, linking them to events and possible sources, and/or establishing their originality is one of the substantial tasks that lies ahead. Again, I will limit myself here to a few intriguing examples. The first is related to the role of the lotteries in education and in cultural dissemination, and it comes from the aforementioned lottery of Den Bosch. A lot-buyer in Leuven produced the following proze: Duysent vyffhondert tachentich acht, dat jaer dat Regiomontanus betracht, gaet die werelt dan nyet onder soe geschieter sus grooter wonder. Fifteen hundred eighty-eight, the year indicated by Regiomontanus, if the world will not be doomed by then, then an even greater miracle will happen.57

Of course, Leuven was at the time still the main centre of scholarship in the Low Countries, and the ‘author’ of the proze may have been a member of the academic community. This is nevertheless a remarkable example of rapid cultural transmission, though the main character in the proze had died long before. Regiomontanus (‘from the King’s Mountain’) was the scholarly name of Johannes Müller (1436–79), born in the Bavarian town of Königsberg, hence the Latinised name.58 He was considered to have been one of the most learned mathematicians and astronomers of his time: he was the founder of modern trigonometry and an early proponent of Gregorian calendar reform. The accurate prediction of a lunar eclipse on 18 February 1504 in his Ephemerides ab anno 1475–1506 (published in Venice and Nürnberg, 1474) confirmed his fame posthumously. This made the feigned discovery in his surviving papers of a verse predicting the end of the world in 1588 important news. This prediction was published in 1553, but received great attention in 1564, when the Bohemian astronomer Cyprian von Leowitz confirmed the view (attributed to Regiomontanus) that a disastrous conjunction of planets would occur.59 Cyprian even Leiden, Municipal Archives, Gasthuisarchief, nr. 426, register of the drawing of the lottery, fol. 97v, nr. 971. Van Dijck, De Bossche Loterij, p. 215, no. 8323. Regiomontanus-Studien. ed. by Günther Hamann, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften: Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, ccclxiv and Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Geschichte der Mathematik, Naturwissenschaften und Medizin, xxviii–xxx (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1980), p. 15. 59 Prognosticon Warhafftige weissagung der fürnemsten dingen so vom 1564 Jar biß auff das 1607 sich zutragen werden, auß den Finsternussen und grossen Ephemeri des Hochgelerten Cypriani Leovicii, und auß dem Prognostico Samuelis Syderocratis, gezogen und zusamen gestellt (Straßburg: Matthias Apiarius, c. 1564) and De coniunctionibus magnis insignioribus superiorum planetarum, solis defectionibus et cometis (Lauingen: Emanuel Saltzer 1564). See Volker Leppin, ‘“[…] Mit dem künfftigen Jüngsten Tag und Gericht vom sünden schlaff auffgeweckt.” Lutherische Apokalyptik zwischen Identitätsvergewaltigung und Sozialdisziplinierung (1548–1618)’, in Endzeiten: Eschatologie in den monotheistischen Weltreligionen, ed. by Wolfram Brandes and Felicitas Schmieder (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 339–51. 56 57 58

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went so far as to announce the second coming of Christ. It is striking to find an immediate echo of this publication in the lottery of Den Bosch, in what seems to be a spontaneous adaptation of an older Middle High German verse, the origin of which is unclear.60 Wenn man zelt 1580 und acht, Das ist das jar, das ich bedacht. Gehet in dem die Welt nicht unter, So geschieht doch sonst mercklich wunder. If we count 1580 and eight That will be the year that I mentioned If the world does not go down by then Many miracles at least will occur.

The origin of a political statement that was read eighteen times as a proze during the drawing of the lottery of Den Bosch — since the (anonymous) local lot-buyer bought that same number of lottery tickets — is equally obscure. Twee Martens die hebben gebrocht die werelt in roeren, deen quelden die papen ende dandere die boeren. Two Martins have brought the world to turmoil One who tormented the priests, the other the farmers.61

This is a clear reference to Martin Luther and to the military commander Maarten van Rossum (c. 1478–1555). Until 1543, Van Rossum served Duke Charles of Guelders in his wars against Charles V. He participated in a pillaging of the Hague, but received particular ill fame for his actions and the reign of terror around Antwerp and in the Brabantine countryside in the year 1542.62 These dramatic events led the Antwerp female rhetorician Anna Bijns to write a long text in which she compared both Martins.63 Remarkably enough, in her comparison Martin Luther was the real bad guy, whereas in most of the dozens of pamphlets circulating at the time the tyrannighen wolf (‘tyrannical wolf ’) Maarten van Rossem was considered the worst. The Den Bosch lottery proze is a later echo of this discourse. Another Den Bosch proze also reflects the political situation, as it shows the political preferences of its author, who employed Latin for his law-abiding statement: ‘Destructo sacro romano imperio nascetur antechristo’ (‘If the Holy Roman Empire is destroyed, the Antichrist will be born’).64 In the context of the Compromise of Nobles — which would convene for the first time in December 1565 to offer a petition to Regent Margaret of Parma, an action that was the prelude to the Eighty Years War — this is a remarkable sign of loyalty, and of pro-Catholic and pro-Habsburg sentiments in Brabant.65 Leppin, ‘Jüngsten Tag’, p. 346. Van Dijck, De Bossche Loterij, p. 132, no. 5001. In Van Dijck, De Bossche Loterij, p. 134, no. 5081, one lot was bought by someone who presented a variant: ‘Twee Martenen zynder geboren | die stellen die werelt in roeren | die een quelt die papen die andere de boeren’ (‘Two Martins are born, who turn the world in turmoil; one vexes the clergy, the other the farmers’). 62 Verzameld verleden. Veertig gedenkwaardige momenten en figuren uit de vaderlandse geschiedenis, ed.  by Els Kloek (Hilversum: Verloren 2004), pp. 42–46, containng the lemma on Maarten van Rossum written by Leen Dorsman. 63 Herman Pleij, Anna Bijns van Antwerpen (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2012), pp.  290–306; and Pleij, ‘Anna Bijns als pamflettiste? Het refrein over de beide Maartens’, Spiegel der Letteren, 42 (2000), 187–225. 64 Van Dijck, De Bossche Loterij, p. 138, no. 5221. 65 See Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt 1555–1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), passim, esp. 112 ff. 60 61

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Thirty years later, when Leiden was no longer under Habsburg rule, it was impossible any longer to find such a sentiment. In a town that was severely hit, first by a double Spanish siege in 1573–74, causing a severe loss of population and industry, and then by a huge influx of political and religious refugees from Brabant and Flanders, the fight for freedom was glorified. Most illustrative is a proze presented by a certain Cornelis Cornelisz., who lived in the house De Eenhoorn (‘The Unicorn’) in Rotterdam and had bought nine lottery tickets: 66 sLandts vrijheyt soet Die met rooder bloet Van dinwoonders gecocht is Laet doch verduyren, Heer, talder uyren, want die lang gesocht is

The sweet freedom of the land which with the red blood of the inhabitants has been bought, please let it last, o Lord, eternally, as it has been pursued so long.66

Another was produced by a certain Crijn Joesten, who counted on yet another strong, shouted ‘nothing’ after his proze being read: egt toch wat baet Tell me, what gain brings het Spaens senaet to the Spanish senate die doot des Pryns, the death of the prince, in welx steet in whose place Papou tot leet to the popery’s disgrace zijn zoen is gestalt, his son has been put, die doer Gots raet who by God’s advice het lant voerstaet rules the country nae onse wens, according to our wishes, ende met vruet and with a wise maer doichdich moet yet virtuous courage een vroem crijshelt a devout military hero es. is?67

In this case, the outcry ‘nothing’ was not meant to have a double meaning, but was to emphasize that the murder of prince William of Orange on 10 July 1584 had been a useless and senseless act of violence that had not stopped the Dutch Revolt.67 One might suppose that for literary products like these sophisticated prozen, a good education was a prerequisite or that the local rhetoricians served as ghost-writers — or at least provided inspiration. This raises the question of the role of informal education and the contribution of lotteries to that education. Two examples from the lottery of 1596 in Leiden will have to suffice to illustrate the didactic effect of the production of lottery prozen and of the spectacle of lottery drawing itself. Several ‘collectives’ participated in the hunt for prizes: neighbourhood associations, parishes, schools, and guilds spent part of the funds to support those in need, hoping for an earthly or heavenly reward. Among them were the members of the Leiden butchers’ guild. Their proze was more elegant than one might expect, given their craft: 66 67

Leiden, Municipal Archives, Gasthuisarchief, nr. 429, registers of the lot-sellers, nr. 19439. Leiden, Municipal Archives, Gasthuisarchief, nr. 429, registers of the lot-sellers, nr. 26559.

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Neringe Commerce maect goede teringe makes a good living om wel te hooven. To be well received. Wilt daer voor dancken Pray, be thankful for it als goede rancken as good tendrils, den Heer hier boven. to the Lord above.68

With an elegant ‘aabccb’ structure, this proze followed one of the most beloved rhyme schemes in the genre of proverbs.69 The biblical metaphor of the community of Christians as the vineyard of the Lord, where Christ is the vine and the faithful the tendrils, was also frequently used in proverbs and sayings. Nevertheless, at first sight it is not easy to understand where the butchers got their inspiration, given that they were trained to cut meat instead of metrical feet. There seems, however, to be a good explanation. At the end of the sixteenth century, Leiden had two chambers: the so-called Hollandish Chamber, the aforementioned Witte Acoleye, which was directly involved in the organization of the lottery,70 and the Flemish Chamber, the Witte Lelye (‘White Lily’) with the motto ‘in liefde groeyende’ (‘growing in love’). The Flemish Chamber was formally founded in 1590 after an informal existence of several years.71 One of the sixteen men who were registered as members in the founding act was the butcher Pieter Gerritsz. Vermersch, born in Harelbeke.72 If this Vermersch indeed composed the proze for his fellow butchers, this is a clear example of informal cultural transmission. Of course the repetitive reading of prozen connected to lottery tickets that were bought in large numbers, and consequently read very often, contributed in a different way to the cultural landscape of the Low Countries. An extreme example of this education through repetition is the proze presented by nobleman Johan van Duivenvoirde, Lord of Warmond, who at the time of the lottery served as admiral of the fleet of the Orangist provinces.73 The admiral won huge fame when, on 30 June 1596 (the year of the lottery) and together with the English admiral Charles Howard, he sunk a Spanish fleet in the harbour of Cadiz and pillaged the town.74 Johan van Duivenvoirde understood the obligations of class and prestige. He bought no less than 4690 lottery tickets, meaning that during the fifty-two days of the drawing his ‘message’ was repeated on average every sixteen minutes. His proze pleaded for education, prestige, and the admiralty: Als den oppersten Jupiter in ‘t hoochste geseten, wis, met zijnen donderslaenden blixem ons wil convoyeren cloock, met den natgrijzen Neptunus wiens hantferck gespleten is, wat can Pluto, Aeolus of Boreas ons deeren, oock?

Leiden, Municipal Archives, Gasthuisarchief, nr. 426, register of the drawing, fol. 15r, nr. 16196. Van Anrooij and Willaart, ‘Cort jolijt’, p. 219. Koppenol, Leids heelal, esp. p. 80. Johannes G. C. A. Briels, ‘“Reyn geneucht”, Zuidnederlandse kamers van Rhetorica in Noord-Nederland, 1585–1630’, Bijdragen voor de geschiedenis, 57 (1974), 3–89. 72 Koppenol, Leids heelal, p. 383. 73 Ab G. van der Steur, ‘Johan van Duvenvoirde en Woude (1546–1610); heer van Warmond, admiraal van Holland’, in Hollandse studiën 8 (Dordrecht: Historische Vereniging Holland, 1975), pp. 179–273. 74 Van der Steur, ‘Johan van Duvenvoirde,’ pp. 195–98. 68 69 70 71

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Fig.5: Fol. 59r of the register of the drawing of the Leiden Lottery, 1596, giving the text of the intricate verse and mentioning the winning of a silver beer-mug by Johan van Duvenvoirde (Leiden, Municipal Archives, Gasthuisarchief, no. 426; photo by the author).

If the supreme Jupiter, seated on high, surely, wants to convoy us with his thunder-striking lightning, bravely, with the wet-grey Neptune, whose harpoon is split, what harm could be done by Pluto, Aeolus or Boreas?75 75

Leiden, Municipal Archives, Gasthuisarchief, nr. 429, registers of the lot-sellers, nr. 10752.

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Since the tickets must have been bought before the admiral set sail to the south, the proze gained extra weight. As a text, with its very intricate rhyme scheme and the elaborate use of classical mythology, it is of a kind that we would suppose to be far beyond the cultural horizon of the average citizen. But, thanks to the lottery, it entered everyone’s ears and minds numerous times. And of course Johan too must have expected — maybe even intended — that after the reading of his proze a loud ‘Nothing!’ would confirm the conviction that no harm should be feared if the gods are on your side — not even from the most dreadful storms. Van Duvenvoirde won one silver rummer with a weight of four ounces pure silver, two silver spoons, and one silver beer-mug with a weight of seven ounces.76 When Johan and his wife Odilia made up their last will in 1609, the latter prize was still in the family, and was described as the ‘large gilt cup, with lid, main prize of the lottery of Leiden’.77 The Risk of (Ill) Fame Given that the proze of Van Duvenvoirde was read  hundreds of times, Piero must have served shifts as leser or nyet-rouper and declaimed this verse as well. These performances, next to the play of fools which he wrote and performed, carried his fame far outside the circle of rhetoricians, as did his performances at many festivities organized by other chambers of rhetoric, both inside and outside Holland. He would soon discover, however, that fame had a darker side. The proze quoted at the beginning of this contribution, stating that ‘he who amused the people with foolish play’ was also the man ‘who made all of us sigh’, mirrored a general awareness among the Leiden public that Piero may have been a harmless comic, but had an unpleasant side as an usher as well. Soon Piero would have a trick played on him. On 14 September 1597, all over the town of Leiden and its surroundings, posters were spread, announcing — in the way of a mock warrant — that two weeks later at the house of the sheriff of Leiderdorp, all movables and estates of Jonker Mors and Vrou Lors, the two main characters of the fools’ play, would be auctioned.78 Pieter Cornelis van der Mersch reacted furiously, and without any sense of humour. When rumour had it that the members of his own chamber of rhetoric had played a trick on Piero, he had De Witte Acoleye temporarily closed. When it was reopened on 29 September, after the date of the announced ‘auction’ had passed without anything happening, the rhetoricians’ ‘emperor’ Mathijs Harmansz. van Crenenborch had to leave the scene, being dismissed as ‘emperor’. Although no further details are known, he must have been involved or at least been held responsible. Piero’s honour seemed to be restored, but the rhetoricians had shot themselves in the foot. In one blow they had forfeited all respect from the urban authorities, and it was many years before they regained official sympathy. Was this a sign of change, or just a complication? On the whole, the position of rhetoricians in Holland and their involvement in lotteries was about to change. Jan van Hout’s invention of the lottery-play initially found imitation everywhere. Between 1596 and 1615 some thirty lottery-plays were written and performed to support hospital De Boer and Bostoen, ‘Sorte non Sorte’, p. 230. Van der Steur, ‘Johan van Duvenvoirde’, p. 265. Leiden, Municipal Archives, Stadsarchief, inv.nr. 48 Gerechtsdagboek D, fol. 224r–225v. Analyzed by Mul. Tyt., p. 54ff, also mentioned by Koppenol, Leids heelal, p. 382. 76 77 78

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lotteries. Paraphrasing Koppenol, ‘the theatre, as abominated as it was by ministers and vicars, had become a weapon in the struggle against poverty’.79 A Haarlem lottery in 1606 was more or less the zenith of the lottery tradition. But leniency towards gambling and lotteries would soon fade away, when the Reformed church started to follow a new course, one in which a sober, rigid, God-fearing Calvinism left no room for idle pleasures. The Synod of Dordrecht in 1618–19 dictated a new moral code, and when the self-cleansing potential of society was not strong enough, the Provincial States of Holland declared on 27 March 1628 that lotteries were ‘een onbehoorlijcke middel  […] om proffijt te doen, oock zeer ondienstich voor de gemeente’ (‘an improper means […] to gain profit, and also very detrimental to the community).80 From then on, not only private lotteries (these had always been considered undesirable) but also institutional lotteries were banned. Only towards the end of the seventeenth century would a revival take place. But the new lotteries would follow the Italian examples. Prozen would return for a while, but pre-printed on the lottery tickets, above the numbers, reduced to a memory of the cultural legacy of the Low Countries’ ‘long sixteenth century’.

Koppenol, Leids heelal, p. 384. Ineke C. M.  Huysman, Particuliere notulen van de vergaderingen der Staten van Holland, 1620–1640. Nicolaes Stellingwerff en Sybrant Schot. Bd. III: Juli 1625–april 1728, RGP: Grote Serie, 206 (The Hague: Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis, 1989), no. 3612.

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State of Play Rhetorician Drama and the Ambiguities of Censorship in the Early Modern Low Countries Anne-Laure Van Bruaene Universiteit Gent

The history of censorship is a hard subject to tackle. Although official censorship is by no means absent from our present-day society, we tend to see our own libel laws as rational, while we look with a negative — or, at least, patronizing — eye at censorship policies in the Ancien Régime. In addition, studies of historical censorship differ greatly in both their focus and presumptions. Not surprisingly, most research on early modern censorship is devoted to the regulation of the printing press. Indeed, at the beginning of the early modern period, the new medium of the printing press opened unprecedented opportunities for the large dissemination of a wide variety of heterodox and unconventional opinions and ideas. At the same time, because printed texts are material artefacts whose production results from complex technical processes, the authorities were able to embrace new, more sophisticated techniques for the regulation of expression. For a long time, therefore, the focus of historians of censorship was on institutions such as the Roman inquisition, the Index, and state censorship bodies whose efficacy was never seriously questioned.1 More recently, many scholars have argued that although secular and ecclesiastical authorities throughout the early modern period devised all kinds of ingenuous mechanisms to control the publication and proliferation of texts, success was never guaranteed and always depended on people, circumstance, and negotiation.2 In this more nuanced approach, censorship remains an easily recognizable cultural practice. Postmodern historical thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Stephen Greenblatt, however, have argued that censorship was all-pervasive in early modern society and was exercised primarily through

Edoardo Tortarolo, ‘Censorship in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Modern European History, 3 (2005), pp. 18–22. For the issue of censorship in the sixteenth-century Low Countries, see, among others, Henk van Nierop, ‘Censorship, Illicit Printing, and the Revolt of the Netherlands’, in Too Mighty to be Free: Censorship and the Press in Britain and the Netherlands, ed.  by Alastair  C. Duke and C.  A. Tamse (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1987), pp.  29–44; and Andrew  G. Johnston, ‘L’Imprimerie et la Réforme aux Pays-Bas, 1520–c. 1555’, in La Réforme et le livre. L’Europe de l’imprimé (1517–v. 1570), ed. by Jean-François Gilmont (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1990), pp. 155–86; Jerome Machiels, Privilegie, censuur en indexen in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden tot aan het begin van de 18de eeuw (Brussels: Algemeen Rijksarchief, 1997); and, more generally, Aline Goossens, Les Inquisitions modernes dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux, 1520–1633, 2 vols (Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1997–98). 2 David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 152–53. 1

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 295-308. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114013

Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

Fig. 1: Invitation for the landjuweel festival in 1561. Woodcut in Spelen van Sinne… (Antwerp: Willem Silvius, 1562). Ghent University Library, BL. 5856.

a wide range of discourses rather than through a limited set of institutional practices.3 Although it is not easy for social historians to study such a broadly defined concept of censorship, it helps to remind us that the regulation of expression was always about more than straightforward repression and was more convoluted than a simple relationship between censor and censored. This insight holds especially true for the censorship of drama, with which this essay is concerned. Early modern drama was an ephemeral and complex mixed medium that combined oral, physical, and visual performance. Drama could be performed anywhere, from the highest court circles to the shabbiest village greens. Its staging could be preceded by elaborate preparations or could be more or less spontaneous. By their very nature, theatrical performances were open to multiple interpretations and their relationship — if any — with written texts, both manuscript and print, always remained ambiguous.4 For the authorities, therefore, not only was it very hard from a technical point of view to develop mechanisms for the control of dramatic expression, but also it was not an easy undertaking from a more general cultural point of view to decide where the political, religious, and moral limits of acceptable drama lay. This essay addresses the issue of censorship of rhetorician drama and, more generally, the regulation of the cultural practices of the chambers of rhetoric in the early modern Low Countries. The central argument will be that, although both rhetoricians themselves and the authorities that sanctioned them were convinced of the need to set boundaries for public speech and performance, these boundaries remained fluid and even created new opportunities for a rich literary practice. To make this point, this essay looks at the regulation of rhetorician performances from two different angles. First, the rhetoricians’ own notions about free speech and expression will be discussed; second, the focus will be References to the relevant work of both thinkers are in Janet Clare, ‘Historicism and the Question of Censorship in the Renaissance’, English Literary Renaissance, 27 (1997), pp. 155–76. See also Tortarolo, ‘Censorship’, p. 20. 4 On the history of theatre in the Low Countries, see Een theatergeschiedenis der Nederlanden. Tien eeuwen drama en theater in Nederland en Vlaanderen, ed.  by Rob  L. Erenstein (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996). More generally, on the history of literature, see Herman Pleij, Het gevleugelde woord. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur, 1400–1560 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2007). 3

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on political and religious censorship exercised by the central authorities. It must be noted that this essay deliberately favours a broad institutional approach, leaving aside the often complex network relations that lay at the base of cultural policies and highlighting instead general ideas, strategies, actions, and their effects. Regulation of Speech and Expression by the Rhetoricians One of the main features of early modern rhetorician culture was its highly institutional character. Rhetorician drama was usually produced within a well-defined context, namely that of the chambers of rhetoric. These chambers were guilds or confraternities of mainly laymen that trained their members in the writing and reciting of verse texts and in the performance of plays. From about the 1450s onwards, chambers of rhetoric were established in many towns and became strongly embedded in the urban culture of the Low Countries. Rhetoricians’ favourite dramatic genres were spelen van zinne (‘allegorical’ or ‘morality plays’), esbattementen (‘farces’), and tafelspelen (‘banquet plays’). The chambers participated in civic festivities such as religious processions, princely entries, and peace celebrations; they organized their own theatre and poetry festivals both in the public sphere and in the semiprivate sphere of their meeting places. Local authorities encouraged the engagement of the chambers of rhetoric in public culture by ratifying their statutes and by granting them local privileges and occasional or permanent subventions (usually wine or money).5 It has to be emphasized that, in the particular institutional context of the chambers of rhetoric, expression was simultaneously free and regulated. One of the basic concepts of rhetorician culture was competition, both among individual rhetoricians and among chambers.6 This implied that literary expression was formalized and was often expected to follow strict rules. For example, rhetoricians were trained to compose ballads or refreinen on a predetermined envoi. Invitations for theatre festivals proposed a central question for morality plays, such as, for example, for the Ghent competition in 1539: ‘Welc den mensche stervende meesten troost es?’ (‘What is the dying man’s greatest consolation?’). Usually, the central argument had to be proven by a three-fold demonstration: in a ‘natural’ way, by reference to the reality God created; in a ‘scriptural’ way, by reference to such authorities as Scripture and the Church Fathers; and in a ‘figurative’ way, by use of metaphor, allegory, and image.7 Paradoxically, while regulating the procedures for literary composition, rhetoricians had considerable freedom in the development of their arguments. In the case of religious theatre and poetry, for example, it was not the greatest devotion to doctrinal points that counted, but the rational and critical reflection on how religious truths could Dirk Coigneau, ‘Rederijkersliteratuur’, in Historische letterkunde. Facetten van vakbeoefening, ed.  by Marijke Spies (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1984), pp. 35–57; Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, ‘“A Wonderfull Tryumfe, for the Wynning of a Pryse”: Guilds, Ritual, Theater, and the Urban Network in the Southern Low Countries, ca. 1450–1650’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59 (2006), pp. 374–405; Van Bruaene, Om beters wille. Rederijkerskamers en de stedelijke cultuur in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (1400–1650) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008); and Arjan van Dixhoorn, Lustige geesten. Rederijkers in de Noordelijke Nederlanden (1480–1650) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009). 6 Van Bruaene, ‘Harmonie et honneur en jeu: les compétitions dramatiques et symboliques entre les villes flamandes et brabançonnes aux quinzième et seizième siècles’, in Le Verbe, l’image et les représentations de la société urbaine au Moyen-Age. Actes du colloque international tenu à Marche-en-Famenne du 24 au 27 octobre 2001, ed. by Marc Boone, Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, and Jean-Pierre Sosson (Antwerp: Garant, 2002), pp. 227–38. 7 Nelleke Moser, De strijd voor rhetorica. Poëtica en positie van rederijkers in Vlaanderen, Brabant, Zeeland en Holland tussen 1450 en 1620 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001), pp. 132–46. 5

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be attained. In other words, rhetoricians were trained to think creatively.8 Until at least the first decades of the sixteenth century, these practices seem to have received the general approbation of the clergy. There are few indications that, as was the case in France, the Church opposed the performance of lay religious drama by the chambers of rhetoric.9 On the contrary, clerics with different ecclesiastical backgrounds became members of the chambers of rhetoric, wrote rhetorician plays, or functioned as jurors during rhetorician competitions. The verses composed by rhetoricians were sometimes hung up in churches to be read by parishioners.10 It has been one of the main contentions of recent work on the chambers of rhetoric that the literary performances of the rhetoricians and the institutional framework in which they functioned contributed decisively to the development of a culture of free debate and discussion in the late medieval and early modern Low Countries.11 In their meeting places, rhetoricians openly discussed religious and political matters and social issues. During public competitions, these debates were shared with large urban audiences. Most rhetoricians, with their middle-class backgrounds, were certainly neither political nor religious hardliners, but precisely for this reason their intellectual attitudes played a considerable role in the elaboration of a cultural model paradigmatic for the Low Countries, and that would eventually make the Dutch Republic an exception in an increasingly intolerant early modern Europe.12 By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, much of the rhetoricians’ literary output was political in tone, although it was seldom subversive in a social sense.13 The creative and reflexive attitude typical of rhetorician culture did not imply, however, that rhetoricians were advocates of unlimited free speech and expression.14 The status of individual authors was almost always deemed less important than the interests of the collective body.15 A central notion of rhetorician practices was that of harmony or ‘liefde’ (‘love’). This meant that good relations needed to be maintained among individual rhetoricians, among chambers of rhetoric, and between chambers and other corporate bodies and institutions.16 According to their statutes and other institutional documents, Coigneau, ‘Bedongen creativiteit. Over retoricale productieregeling’, in Medioneerlandistiek. Een inleiding tot de Middelnederlandse letterkunde, ed.  by Ria Jansen-Sieben and others (Hilversum: Verloren, 2000), pp.  129–37; and Van Bruaene, ‘In Principio Erat Verbum: Drama, Devotion, Reformation and Urban Association in the Low Countries’, in Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas, ed. by Christopher Black and Pamela Gravestock (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 64–80. 9 Cf.  Jeannine Horowitz, ‘Le Théâtre sacré aux xive–xve siècles: une réflexion socio-religieuse’, Revue d’histoire du théâtre, 221–22 (2004), pp. 58–68. 10 See, for example, Maria Elizabeth Kronenberg, ‘Gemengde berichten uit de kringen van theologen en rederijkers te Antwerpen, Brussel en Gent (begin 16e eeuw)’, in Prosper Verheyden gehuldigd ter gelegenheid van zijn zeventigsten verjaardag 23 Oct. 1943 (Antwerp: Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1943), pp. 237–38. 11 The concept of a Dutch ‘discussiecultuur’ has been developed, in particular, in Willem Frijhoff and Spies, 1650. Bevochten eendracht. Nederlandse cultuur in Europese context (The Hague: SDU, 1999). 12 Gary Waite, Reformers on Stage: Popular Drama and Religious Propaganda in the Low Countries of Charles V, 1515– 1556 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); Van Bruaene, Om beters wille, pp.  253–57; Van Dixhoorn, Lustige geesten, pp.  26–34; and Jan Bloemendal and Van Dixhoorn, ‘“De scharpheit van een gladde tong”. Literaire teksten en publieke opinievorming in de vroegmoderne Nederlanden’, BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review, 125.1 (2010), pp. 3–28. 13 Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, ‘“Let Each Man Carry on with his Trade and Remain Silent”: Middle-Class Ideology in the Urban Literature of the Late Medieval Low Countries’, Cultural and Social History, 10.2 (2013), pp. 169–89. 14 For a more general discussion of notions about free speech and free press in the Low Countries, see Joris van Eijnatten, ‘Van godsdienstvrijheid naar mensenrecht. Meningsvorming over censuur en persvrijheid in de Republiek, 1579–1795’, BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review, 118 (2003), pp. 1–21. 15 On the rhetorician as individual author, see Met eigen ogen. De rederijker als dichtend individu (1450–1600), ed. by Coigneau and Samuel Mareel (Ghent: Jaarboek de Fonteine, 2009). 16 Van Bruaene, ‘Harmonie et honneur’. 8

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rhetoricians were particularly concerned with the use of defamatory language, often described as vilonie. Rhetoricians were not allowed to insult or mock each other either in ordinary conversation or through literary compositions. This rule applied in the first place to the privacy of the meeting rooms of the chambers of rhetoric, but was often extended to the public sphere. For example, invitations for public competitions always included a warning not to insult any private or public figures in plays and other literary compositions, a warning often repeated by local authorities.17 This seems to have been a necessary caution, as there is plenty of evidence that rhetoricians indeed frequently used literary expression to defame their competitors and public rivals. A notorious example is that of the Baladen van Doornijcke written in 1521/22 by the famous rhetorician Mathijs de Castelein, a priest and notary from Oudenaarde. In this text, he includes a tirade against the inhabitants of the city of Tournai, whom, in an ironical turn, he accuses — among other things — of having staged insulting plays.18 The rhetoricians’ concern with defamatory language was thus always ambivalent, and the same held true for their preoccupation with blasphemy. Arguably, blasphemy was the early modern sin par excellence, since both Catholic and Protestant reformers were most seriously concerned about any abuse of God’s name.19 This is reflected in the many chambers of rhetoric statutes warning members not to curse or swear, neither out of bad habit nor, certainly, with malign intention. These regulations conformed both to general cultural sensibilities and to the rhetoricians’ own focus on ornate language.20 Yet rhetoricians were also aware that a good play needed bad language. For example, the sinnekens (loosely, ‘little devils’) that impersonated all kinds of vices in morality plays owed their popularity to their foul and irreverent speech.21 This paradox is illustrated in a few chambers of rhetoric statutes that stipulated that rhetoricians were not allowed to name the devil (usually cautiously referred to as ‘the black angel’), except in a play or other literary composition, when such a transgression was deemed unavoidable.22 For example, the 1556 statute of De Kersouwe in Oudenaarde boldly states: ‘Oock, zoo en vermach niemandt gheenssins den duvel te noemen by ‘s duvele name, ofte ten ware speelwijs, ofte in een refereyn, ofte eenighe rhetorijcke, daer ‘t van noode waere’ (‘Also, no one may under any circumstance name the devil by the devil’s name, except in a play or in a poem or in another rhetorical form, when it is necessary’). By way of temporary conclusion, it is therefore safe to say that the general cultural pattern that was formed within rhetorician circles comprised a complex set of values with regard to the moral boundaries of expression and performance.

Van Bruaene, Om beters wille, pp. 241–43. Van Bruaene, ‘De stad als scheldwoord. De Baladen van Doornijcke (1521/1522) van Matthijs de Castelein en de stedelijke literaire praktijk van de rederijkers’, Spiegel der Letteren, 48 (2006), pp. 135–47. 19 Elisabeth Belmas, ‘La Montée des blasphèmes à l’âge moderne du Moyen Âge au xviie siècle’, in Injures et blasphèmes, ed. by Jean Delumeau (Paris: Imago, 1989), pp. 13–33; and Alain Cabantous,, Histoire du blasphème en Occident, xvie–xixe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998). 20 Van Dixhoorn, ‘Als retorica regeert. Rederijkersregels rond taalgebruik en gedrag in de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw’, De zeventiende eeuw, 18 (2002), pp. 17–30; Van Bruaene, Om beters wille, p. 243. 21 W. M. H. Hummelen, De sinnekens in het rederijkersdrama (Groningen: Wolters, 1958); and Femke L. Kramer, Mooi vies, knap lelijk. Grotesk realisme in rederijkerskluchten (Hilversum: Verloren, 2009), pp. 206–59. 22 Van Bruaene, Om beters wille, p. 244. Cf. Tine Luk Meganck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Fall of the Rebel Angels: Art, Knowledge and Politics on the Eve of the Dutch Revolt (Brussels: Royal Museums of Fine Art of Belgium, 2014), pp. 136–40. 17 18

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Civil War and Civic Rhetoric: Political Censorship in the 1490s The first real reservations about the institutions and literary performances of the rhetoricians were voiced by central authorities. Nonetheless, as I will argue, straightforward repression was never the true object of the measures taken by rulers. In order to make this point, I will discuss central policy in the period roughly coinciding with the sixteenth century, focusing on two documents that played a crucial role in the negotiation of the boundaries for the theatrical practices of the chambers of rhetoric: a letter from Duke Philip the Fair from 1493 and an edict issued by King Philip II and Governess Margaret of Parma in 1560. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, chambers of rhetoric had become a fully integrated part of the urban culture of the county of Flanders and the duchy of Brabant, while in the counties of Zeeland and Holland the first chambers were being instituted.23 There are few indications that before this period the chambers of rhetoric had been subject to any serious repressive measures from the authorities. The first concern of local authorities was always public order. Chambers of rhetoric could receive a warning when they defamed public figures or corporations in their plays or caused some form of unrest, but usually city magistracies were more worried about unorganized theatre and carnival groups.24 As stated above, in general the clergy was similarly supportive of rhetorician practices. For example, one of the first princes of the Antwerp chamber De Violieren was Jan van Parys, who assumed the function in 1487 and decided to enter the priesthood after his wife’s death.25 The first document that clearly signalled a concern of the Burgundian-Habsburg authorities for the regulation of rhetorician culture is neither an official ordinance nor an edict, but a letter sent by Duke Philip the Fair to one of his chaplains on 20 March 1493. In this letter, the Duke announced his intention to organise a meeting with all Dutch-language chambers of rhetoric in the city of Malines, where the court resided. This meeting took place on 1 May 1493,26 and the date is in itself remarkable, since the gathering — which took place during a period of intense political activity — directly followed a meeting of the Estates General (13 April to 1 May), the highest representative body of the Low Countries, and immediately preceded the important Peace of Senlis (23 May 1493) with France.27 The decision to convoke a group of rhetoricians at exactly this time and place can be decoded as a clear hint of the sense of urgency the court felt in this matter. The meeting was attended by eighteen chambers of rhetoric from Brabant, Flanders, and Holland.28 There are no records of the meeting’s proceedings, but according to Philip the Fair’s letter, representatives of the chambers of rhetoric were to bring plays, refreinen, and other rhetorical amusements in order that a consensus could be reached about their appropriateness after a discussion of the Van Dixhoorn, Lustige geesten, pp. 35–40. Pleij, ‘Van keikoppen en droge jonkers. Spotgezelschappen, wijkverenigingen en het jongerengericht in de literatuur en het culturele leven van de late middeleeuwen’, Volkskundig bulletin, 15 (1989), pp. 297–315. 25 De liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche Sint Lucasgilde, onder zinspreuk: ‘Wt ionsten versaemt’, ed. by Philips Rombouts and Theodoor Van Lerius, 2 vols (Antwerp: Baggerman, 1872–76), i, p. 40. Many other notes in De liggeren, ed. by Rombouts and Van Lerius, point to a direct and positive relationship with the local clergy. 26 Oorspronck der cameren van Rhetorycke, statuten ende ordonnancien der selve onder den titel Jesus metter Balsem Bloume, ed. by René Haeserijn (Ghent: Provinciebestuur Oost-Vlaanderen, 1960), p. 21. 27 Robert Wellens, Les Etats généraux des Pays-Bas des origines à la fin du règne du Philippe le Beau (1464–1506) (Kortrijk: Standen en Landen, 1974), pp.  228–30, 472–75; and Jean-Marie Cauchies, Philippe le Beau, le dernier duc de Bourgogne (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), p. 21. 28 Eugeen Van Autenboer, Volksfeesten en rederijkers te Mechelen, 1400–1600 (Ghent, Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde, 1962), pp. 96–97. 23 24

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subject matter with court representatives.29 In addition, during or shortly after the meeting it was decided by the court that a sovereign chamber of rhetoric, named De Balsemblomme, would be established. The initial plan was that this sovereign chamber would accompany the travelling court, but this idea was soon abandoned due to its high costs. De Balsemblomme received the authority to institute new chambers and to scrutinize the statutes of existing chambers. The stated aim of the court was to impose on all chambers of rhetoric ‘een ­ghelijcke Reghele ende usance van dichtene’ (‘conforming rules and poetical practices’).30 Although it remains unclear what the court’s concept of conformity embraced, it is obvious that its aim was to establish some degree of censorship on the performances of the chambers of rhetoric. In all likelihood, this was primarily political censorship. Philip the Fair’s initiative came shortly after the close of a decade of revolts and civil war, triggered by a dispute between Philip’s father, Maximilian of Austria, and the Flemish cities over the issue of regency during the Burgundian heir’s minority.31 There are several indications that, during those years in powerful cities like Ghent and Bruges, the performances of the rhetoricians had been highly political in nature and had promoted the cause of the cities in revolt. As a young and motherless child, Duke Philip himself had probably been present a few times at the staging of politically charged rhetorician plays in Ghent, where he was held captive by the rebels.32 We can thus read Philip the Fair’s 1493 initiative as a first attempt by central authorities to censor rhetorician practices and, by doing so, to manage public opinion. It has to be underlined that this campaign to get a firm grip on the literary performances of the rhetoricians never met with any real success. The sovereign chamber that was instituted in 1493 soon proved to be ineffectual.33 And yet the court’s engagement with the chambers of rhetoric and with urban culture in general in this period had important consequences for the further development of rhetorician culture. With the direct and indirect support of the court, many large-scale, often interregional rhetorician competitions were held in the aftermath of the Malines meeting.34 Probably the most spectacular of these was the Antwerp landjuweel of 1496 that was directly sanctioned by Philip the Fair and that was attended by twenty-eight chambers from Brabant, Flanders, Holland, and Zeeland.35 As I have argued elsewhere, large competitions of this kind contributed to the cultural unification of the core territories of the Low Countries.36 During the same years, through the direct and indirect mediation of court representatives, much rhetorician drama became emphatically dynastic in tone. For example, in residential cities, like Brussels, rhetoricians increasingly staged suitable drama on the occasion of public dynastic celebrations such as joyous entries Oorspronck der cameren, p. 21. Oorspronck der cameren, pp. 26, 79. Wim Blockmans, ‘Autocratie ou polyarchie? La lutte pour le pouvoir politique en Flandre, après des documents inédits, 1482–92’, Bulletin de la Commission Royale d’Histoire, 140 (1974), pp. 257–368; and Haemers, For the Common Good? State Power and Urban Revolts in the Reign of Mary of Burgundy, 1477–1482 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009). 32 Van Bruaene, Om beters wille, pp. 61–63. 33 Van Bruaene, Om beters wille, pp. 73–76. 34 Van Bruaene, Om beters wille, pp. 191–92. 35 Van Autenboer, ‘Een landjuweel te Antwerpen in 1496?’, Jaarboek de Fonteine, 29 (1978–79), pp. 125–50; Werner Waterschoot, ‘Het Landjuweel te Antwerpen in 1496. Enkele teksten en hun interpretatie’, Jaarboek de Fonteine, 32 (1980– 81), pp. 49–68; Maurits Vandecasteele, ‘Het Antwerpse rederijkersfeest van 1496: een onderzoek van de bronnen’, Jaarboek de Fonteine, 36–37 (1985–86), pp. 149–76. 36 Van Bruaene, ‘Sociabiliteit en competitie. De sociaal-institutionele ontwikkeling van de rederijkerskamers in de zuidelijke Nederlanden (1400–1650)’, in Conformisten en rebellen. Rederijkerscultuur in de Nederlanden (1400–1650), ed. by Bart Ramakers (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), pp. 45–63. 29 30 31

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and princely marriage or baptism ceremonies.37 Both in large cities and small towns, they also performed plays that promoted ‘Burgundian’ devotions, such as that of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows.38 Thus, while at the close of the fifteenth century the court did not succeed in directly controlling the theatrical practices of the chambers of rhetoric, it was able to create the preconditions for a cultural climate in which these theatrical performances contributed in part but significantly to its own political agenda. Rhetoric and Reformation After the 1490s, the court seems to have gradually lost interest in rhetorician culture. Its positive engagement came to an end more or less around the same time that Reformed thought was introduced in the Low Countries, but there are no indications that there was a direct relationship between those two facts.39 The first attempts at curbing religious rhetorician drama were not undertaken by central authorities but by regional authorities, in particular in the Northern Low Countries. There, the rhetorician movement was a relatively new phenomenon and, for this reason, regional noble and clerical elites — with the exception of a network of Burgundian officials who wanted to affirm their rising status in Holland’s public society40 — seem to have taken it less for granted. In contrast to their counterparts in the Southern Low Countries, these traditional elites were less familiar with and, therefore, likely less convinced of the benefits of the rhetoricians’ literary practices, especially publicly performed religious drama.41 On the other hand, there are indications that in the younger rhetorician circles of Holland, which were still in search of their own identity, there was a greater receptiveness to Lutheran and, in particular, Anabaptist thought than there was in the established chambers of Flanders and Brabant.42 In any case, it was the provincial Court of Holland that embarked on an early and long offensive against the theatrical performances of its chambers of rhetoric. The Court of Holland prescribed the pre-censoring of plays by local authorities as early as 1528 and proclaimed a provisory ban on all public rhetorician plays in 1539.43 Interestingly, local authorities in Holland and the court in Brussels showed little eagerness to back up these initiatives.44 Susie Speakman Sutch, ‘Dichters van de stad. De Brusselse rederijkers en hun verhouding tot de Franstalige hofliteratuur en het geleerde humanisme (1475–1522)’, in De macht van het schone woord. Literatuur in Brussel van de 14e tot e de 18 eeuw, ed. by Jef Janssens and Remco Sleiderink (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 2003), pp. 141–60; Sutch, ‘Jan Pertcheval and the Brussels Leliebroeders (1490–1500): The Model of a Conformist Rhetoricians Chamber?’, in Conformisten en rebellen, ed. by Ramakers, pp. 95–106; and Mareel, Voor vorst en stad. Rederijkersliteratuur en vorstenfeest in Vlaanderen en Brabant (1432–1561) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010) pp. 143–81. 38 Sutch and Van Bruaene, ‘The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary: Devotional Communication and Politics in the Burgundian-Habsburg Low Countries (c. 1490–1520)’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 61 (2010), pp. 252–78. 39 Sutch and Van Bruaene, ‘The Seven Sorrows’. 40 Serge ter Braake and Van Dixhoorn, ‘Engagement en ambitie. De Haagse rederijkerskamer “Met Ghenuchten” en de ontwikkeling van een burgerlijke samenleving in Holland rond 1500’, Jaarboek voor Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis, 9  (2006), pp. 150–90; and Van Dixhoorn, Lustige geesten, pp. 99–105. 41 On the literary culture of Holland in this period, see Koen Goudriaan, ‘Holland in de tijd van Leeu’, in Een drukker zoekt publiek. Gheraert Leeu te Gouda 1477–1484 (Delft: Eburon, 1993), pp. 31–53; and Herman Brinkman, Dichten uit liefde. Literatuur in Leiden aan het einde van de Middeleeuwen (Hilversum: Verloren, 1997). 42 Van Dixhoorn, Lustige geesten, pp. 270–74. 43 Retoricaal Memoriaal. Bronnen voor de geschiedenis van de Hollandse rederijkerskamers van de middeleeuwen tot het begin van de achttiende eeuw, ed. by Van Boheemen and Van der Heijden, (Delft: Eburon, 1999), pp. 10–11. 44 Van Boheemen and Van der Heijden, Met minnen versaemt. De Hollandse rederijkers vanaf de middeleeuwen tot het begin van de achttiende eeuw. Bronnen en bronnenstudies (Delft: Eburon, 1999), pp.  51–57; and Van Dixhoorn, Lustige geesten, pp. 210–12. 37

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The tide turned when, in the wake of a large rhetorician festival organized in Ghent in 1539, a huge scandal erupted in the Low Countries. According to the Chancellor of Brabant, the plays performed at the festival were ‘plain de malvaises et abusives doctrines et séductions, de tout tendant à l’opinion lutheriaine’ (‘full of bad and abusive doctrines and seductions, all leaning towards the Lutheran opinion’).45 This time, the central authorities did react, and fiercely. Yet they directed their repressive measures not at the organizing chamber or at the other chambers present at the festival, but at an edition of allegorical plays by the Ghent humanist printer Joos Lambrecht.46 This edition was mentioned in an imperial ordinance and in an imperial anti-heresy edict, both issued in 1540, and was put on the Louvain Index. These actions corroborate the fact that, in the first stages of the repression of Reformed thought, central authorities focused their energy on the regulation of the printing press.47 It must be recognized, however, that the imperial ordinance of 1540 also expressed a desire for the wider control of the performance of drama and other forms of literary expression. The ordinance forbade the performance of suspect plays, the naming of scripture or religious authors in plays, and the singing, selling, or distributing of ballads and songs of the same purport.48 Yet, significantly, these measures were less repressive than the general ban on rhetorician plays that had been proposed in Holland a year earlier.49 Moreover, in the following years, the imperial measures were qualified by local ordinances, issued in Flanders with the endorsement of the Brussels court, that imposed only pre-censorship.50 In the years following 1540, control over the performances of the chambers of rhetoric was nevertheless stepped up, but the intensity and nature of the repressive measures depended largely on place, time, persons, and circumstances. In the county of Flanders, Pieter Titelmans, the newly appointed and zealous inquisitor for the region of Flanders, Lille, and Tournai began to investigate the rhetorician plays staged in small towns and villages, often on the occasion of local or regional competitions. While some individual rhetoricians were severely persecuted, serious sanctions against the chambers of rhetoric seldom followed.51 In Antwerp, two prominent rhetoricians, Peter Schuddematte and Frans Fraet, were executed. But in their case their subversive activities in the capacities of, respectively, schoolmaster and printer also heavily weighted the verdict.52 The general suspicion of the Relation des troubles de Gand sous Charles-Quint, par un anonyme: suivie de trois cent trente documents inédits sur cet événement, ed. by Louis P. Gachard (Brussels: Hayez, 1846), p. 256. 46 Spelen van zinne by den xix. gheconfirmeirden Cameren van Rhethorycken binnen der Stede van Ghendt comparerende vertooght: Volghende den Octroye vander K. Maiesteyt, Grave van Vlaendren, onzen geduchten Heere, Schepenen der zelver stede ende Camere van Rhetorijcke vand’ helighe Drivuldigheyt ghezeyt de Fonteynisten, verleent ende der quarte wtghezonden op de questye ‘welc den mensche stervende meesten troost es?’[…] (Ghent: Joos Lambrecht, 1539). For a modern edition, see De Gentse Spelen van 1539, ed. by B. H. Erné and L. M. van Dis, 2 vols (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982). See also Hummelen, ‘31 augustus 1539. De eerste bundel met rederijkersspelen die bij een wedstrijd opgevoerd zijn, komt uit bij Joos Lambrecht Lettersteker te Gent. Spelen van sinne en hun opvoeringspraktijken’, in Een theatergeschiedenis, ed. by Erenstein, pp. 98–105. 47 Van Bruaene, ‘Printing Plays: The Publication of the Ghent Plays of 1539 and the Reaction of the Authorities’, Dutch Crossing, 24 (2000), pp. 265–84. 48 For an edition and discussion of the 1540 ordinance, see Beatrijs De Groote, ‘De overheid en het Gentse rederijkersfeest van 1539’, Jaarboek de Fonteine, 25 (1975), pp. 105–18. 49 Van Dixhoorn, Lustige geesten, p. 212. 50 Johan Decavele, De Dageraad van de Reformatie in Vlaanderen, 2 vols (Brussels: Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, 1975), i, p. 20. 51 Decavele, De Dageraad van de Reformatie, i, pp. 206–20. 52 Pieter Génard, ‘Personen te Antwerpen in de xvie eeuw, voor het “feit van religie” gerechtelijk vervolgd. Lijst en ambtelijke bijhoorige stukken’, Antwerpsch Archievenblad, 8 (n.d.), pp. 374–75; Decavele, De Dageraad van de Reformatie, i, pp. 206–07; and Valkema Blouw, ‘The Van Oldenborch and Vanden Merberghe Pseudonyms or Why Frans Fraet Had to Die’, Quaerendo, 22 (1992), pp. 165–90 and 245–72. 45

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institutions and performances of the chambers of rhetoric remained strongest in Holland, where a number of planned competitions were cancelled while the inquisitor Franciscus Sonnius pleaded for a general ban on rhetorician practices or, at the very least, for wellorganized clerical censorship.53 Whether, in this period, the dramatic performances and other literary expressions of the rhetoricians were really deemed subversive from the viewpoint of the authorities is a question that has been treated elsewhere and that can only be answered here in general terms. Individual rhetoricians held widely diverse opinions on religious matters, although most of them had a middle-class background and were certainly not radicals.54 It is important to underline that the dynamics of rhetorician culture, with its notions of competition and free debate, allowed for the rapid circulation of ideas in large circles (especially, in this period, in the context of closed poetry festivals) and, as a consequence, for a general climate of openness to non-conformist religious thought. This fact, rather than the opinions or actions of individual rhetoricians or the performances of particular chambers of rhetoric, made the rhetorician movement a significant contributing factor in the broad reception of the Reformation in the Low Countries and in the popular support for the Dutch Revolt, and may have been a genuine cause for concern on the part of religious authorities in particular.55 Censorship Defi(n)ed: The Edict of 1560 and the Antwerp Landjuweel of 1561 Although inquisitors like Pieter Titelmans and Franciscus Sonnius had been campaigning much earlier against the practices of the rhetoricians, it took until 1560 before the central authorities embarked on a new legislative initiative. On 26 January of that year, an edict was issued in the name of King Philip II by the Brussels court of his regent, Margaret of Parma. Its aim was to curb the performance of religious theatre, poetry, and songs in the Low Countries. The edict forbade the distribution and performance of all indoor plays, ballads, songs, comedies, farces, and refreinen that touched upon religious matters or upon the persons and estate of the clergy. It imposed pre-censorship by the principal local parish priest, bailiff, or city council on all allegorical plays, tableaux vivants, and other public plays performed in honour of God or his saints and for the recreation of the people.56 Although the text does not directly so state (as it also refers to foreign theatre companies) it is clear that the edict targeted the chambers of rhetoric. The city accounts of the small Flemish town of Tielt, for example, noted that in February 1560 a messenger had brought a copy of a placard that declared ‘dat men gheen retorycke useren en zoude suspect zynde’ (‘that Van Boheemen and Van der Heijden, Met minnen versaemt, pp. 56–57, 234–37; and Van Dixhoorn, Lustige geesten, pp. 212–14, 273. 54 Waterschoot, ‘De rederijkerskamers en de doorbraak van de reformatie in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden’, Jaarboek de Fonteine, 45–46 (1995–96), pp. 141–53; Waite, Reformers on Stage; and Guido Marnef, ‘Chambers of Rhetoric and the Transmission of Religious Ideas in the Low Countries’, in Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, Volume 1: Religion and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700, ed. by Heinz Schilling and Istvan G. Tóth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 284–93. 55 Van Bruaene, ‘“Of the King’s Edict I Do You No Command”: Vernacular Literary Networks and the Reformation in the Low Countries’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 99 (2008), pp. 229–55. 56 Ordonnancien, Statuten, Edicten ende Placcaten, ghepubliceert in de landen van hervvaerts-ouer, van weghen der Keyserlicker ende Conijnghlicker, Magesteyten, ende haerlieder Edele Voorzaten (Ghent: Jan van den Steene, 1562), pp. 815–16 (publication of the edict in Flanders). For a modern edition of the edict published in Holland, see Retoricaal Memoriaal, pp. 13–15. 53

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one could not perform any rhetoric of a suspect nature’).57 This was also made evident in a letter from Margaret of Parma to Philip II, in which she referred to the performance of a number of plays by the Brussels chambers of rhetoric in 1559, which had sparked serious controversy in governmental circles.58 As had been the case since the 1490s, however, the court’s stance towards the chambers of rhetoric remained ambiguous and was certainly not exclusively repressive. It needs to be stressed that the edict of 1560 explicitly noted the religious and social value of allegorical plays and tableaux vivants in contrast to that of more informal, less serious, or less public genres such as songs, farces, and ballads. The edict certainly did not therefore lead to a ban on all the theatrical performances of the chambers of rhetoric. On the contrary, in the early 1560s the Southern Low Countries witnessed an unprecedented surge in regional and interregional rhetorician competitions, both theatrical and lyrical.59 In Flanders, only two planned competitions were suppressed, one in Ghent in 1561 and one in the small town of Ronse in 1564. In both cases, however, governmental policy was tangled up with local agendas. Ironically, the competition to be held in Ghent in 1561 was organized by De Balsemblomme, a literary society that still prided itself on its status as sovereign chamber, though it had long since lost its ties with the court. Interestingly, the initiative to ban the competition did not come from the central government, but from the city magistracy of Ghent. The city council used the edict of 1560 to claim authority over the chamber’s activities and, by doing so, to resolve an ongoing dispute between De Balsemblomme and the local chambers.60 In 1564, a rhetorician competition was to take place in the small town of Ronse, but a ban was issued by the court ‘craindrant les dangiers et inconveniens qui poroient advenir contre nostre foy catholicque’ (‘in fear of the dangers and inconveniences that could happen against our Catholic faith’). This case, too, was quite remarkable, since the organizers had secured the support not only of the local magistracy but also of the dean of Ronse, who was in fact the Flemish inquisitor, Pieter Titelmans. It therefore remains unclear why the governess persevered in this particular case and continued stating her fear of heresy — against the advice of her unflinchingly orthodox inquisitor.61 In Holland, a ban on a rhetorician festival in Gouda in 1564 was eventually withdrawn by the Court of Holland and by the Regent, Margaret of Parma, although the event and the content of the plays continued to spark controversy.62 Arguably most significant for deciphering the court’s attitude were the negotiations surrounding the organization of the famous Antwerp rhetorician festival or landjuweel in Stadsrekeningen Tielt: 1500–1610, ed.  by Frans Hollevoet (Tielt: Heemkundige Kring De Roede van Tielt, 2000), p. 444. 58 Correspondance de Marguerite d’Autriche, duchesse de Parme avec Philippe II. Tome Premier 14 Août 1559–16 Novembre 1561, ed. by Gachard (Brussels: C. Muquardt, 1867), p. 138. On the Brussels’ incidents, see Van Bruaene, ‘Of the King’s Edict’, pp. 233–37. 59 Van Bruaene, ‘Sociabiliteit en competitie’, p. 51, 54, 56. In the Northern Low Countries the trend was less clear: Van Dixhoorn, ‘Burgers, branies en bollebozen. De sociaal-institutionele ontwikkeling van de rederijkerskamers in de Noordelijke Nederlanden (1470–1650)’, in Conformisten en rebellen, ed. by Ramakers, p. 79. 60 Van Bruaene, Om beters wille, pp. 163–64. 61 Edmond Vander Straeten, ‘De Ronssesche rederykkamers in 1564’, in Aldenardiana en Flandriana, ed.  by Vander Straeten (Oudenaarde: Vuylsteke, 1867), i, pp. 150–61; Decavele, De Dageraad van de Reformatie, i, pp. 213–14; and Van Bruaene, Om beters wille, p. 140. 62 Van Boheemen and Van der Heijden, Met minnen versaemt, pp. 59, 251–55. 57

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1561, one of the most emblematic urban festivals of the sixteenth century.63 In this case, the edict of 1560 played a pivotal role, not in suppressing rhetorician culture, but as a tool for enforcing political and religious correctness. Nothing was left to chance: the negotiations between the city and the Governess took several months. All competing plays had to be submitted to the official censors. Chambers who presented religiously or politically suspect plays risked not only being severely punished, but also permanently losing their privileges. Interestingly, however, the court’s interference also had a more positive effect on the literary practices of the rhetoricians. Out of dissatisfaction with the — now unknown — originally proposed question that was deemed too politically charged, the organizing chamber De Violieren was asked to present a list with themes for the festival to the Governess’s council. A first selection was made based on this list. From the three themes endorsed by the court, De Violieren eventually selected the humanist question: ‘Dwelck den mensche aldermeest tot consten verwect’ (‘What awakens man most to the arts?’).64 A great deal has been written on the growing humanist and Renaissance orientation of Dutch vernacular literature in general and rhetorician literature in particular in the second half of the sixteenth century. Often, the landjuweel of 1561 is considered a landmark event in this development.65 At the festival, rhetoricians presented themselves as vernacular humanists, pleading for good education inspired by the classics for the young, and for an active burgership.66 The shifting intellectual attitudes of the rhetoricians themselves were instrumental in this process, but the impact of governmental policies cannot be denied. The fact that the regent more or less handpicked the theme of the landjuweel is perhaps no more than a fait divers. More importantly, the court also sanctioned the edition of the festival plays in two prestigious books with fine woodcuts.67 For the first time since the ill-fated edition of the plays of the Ghent competition in 1539, the fame of a rhetorician festival was officially sanctioned and given long life by the printing press. The editor of the Antwerp festival books was Willem Silvius, who had been recently appointed royal typographer after personal approval by King Philip II.68 During the festival, Silvius had obtained the editorial rights through the mediation of the Chancellor of Brabant. Before the print edition, the festival texts were scrupulously scrutinised: Silvius had to wait for the printer’s licenses until May and August 1562, respectively.69 He was also permitted to bring two other festival books that contained the literary products of a 1561 competition in Rotterdam to the Uyt Ionsten Versaemt. Het Landjuweel van 1561 te Antwerpen, ed. by Elly Cockx-Indestege and Waterschoot (Brussels: Royal Library, 1994). 64 Van Autenboer, Het Brabants landjuweel der rederijkers, 1515–1561 (Middelburg: Merlijn, 1981), pp. 48–56. 65 See, among others, Rhetoric — Rhétoriqueurs — Rederijkers: Proceedings of the colloquium, Amsterdam, 10–13 November 1993, ed. by Jelle Koopmans and others (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1995); Ramakers, ‘De mythe van de grote vertraging’, Queeste, 5 (1998), pp. 58–63; Johan Koppenol, Leids heelal. Het Loterijspel (1596) van Jan van Hout (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998); Spies, Rhetoric, Rethoricians and Poets: Studies in Renaissance Poetry and Poetics (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999); Waterschoot, Schouwende Fantasye. Opstellen van Werner Waterschoot (Ghent: Academia Press, 2002); and Van Dixhoorn, Lustige geesten, pp. 274–76. 66 Jeroen Vandommele, Als in een spiegel. Vrede, kennis en gemeenschap op het Antwerpse Landjuweel van 1561 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2011). 67 Spelen van sinne vol scoone moralisacien, uutleggingen en bediedenissen op alle loeflijcke consten waer inne men claerlijck ghelijck in eenen spieghel, Figuerlijck, Poetelijck ende Retorijckelijck mach aenschouwen hoe nootsakelijck ende dienstelijck die selve consten allen menschen zijn (Antwerp: Willem Silvius, 1562). For a modern edition, see De Antwerpse spelen van 1561 naar de editie Silvius (Antwerpen 1562) uitgegeven met inleiding, annotaties en registers, ed. by Ruud Ryckaert, 2 vols (Ghent: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 2011). 68 Valkema Blouw, ‘Willem Silvius’s remarkable Start, 1559–62’, Quaerendo, 20 (1990), pp. 170–72. 69 Van Autenboer, Het Brabants landjuweel, pp. 20–21. 63

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market in 1564.70 In this case, the censors seem to have been less careful, since the festival’s theme of spiritual solace invited at least some moderately Reform-minded answers.71 Probably partly for this reason, the experiment was not repeated. Willem Silvius had also planned to edit the Gouda plays of 1564, but, because of the controversy surrounding this competition, he was indirectly advised against doing so in a letter from Margaret of Parma.72 The court’s sanctioning of the Antwerp and Rotterdam editions can be understood as a counterbalance to the edict of 1560. These festival books had an important impact on further poetical developments within rhetorician literature.73 Therefore, as had been the case in the 1490s, the central authorities’ more positive engagement with rhetorician culture bore more fruit than their attempts at direct repression. Of course, this success was only partial. Rhetoricians continued to write subversive verses and to use drama for the expression of their own, often very diverse, religious opinions.74 In a country on the eve of the Dutch Revolt, the situation remained explosive, but without the benefit of hindsight, the central authorities’ strategy to regulate (if necessary) and to stimulate (if possible) can be considered quite clever. The court’s attitude also explains why, after the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt, the repeated calls in the Spanish Southern Low Countries to completely ban rhetorician culture were never followed.75 Instead, in 1601 the Archdukes Albert and Isabella reissued the edict of 1560 in an updated version that reflected the cultural sensibilities of the Counter-Reformation. The edict of 1601 allowed for a greater role for the clergy, in particular with respect to the censor librorum, who was responsible for the pre-censoring of literary compositions. It stipulated that theatrical performances could no longer be held at the same time as masses and sermons that layfolk were expected to attend. Most significant, perhaps, was that in addition to its orthodoxy, the morality of lay drama had become a real concern, and theatre plays were no longer to offend good manners.76 In sum, a new era had dawned, in which the role of rhetorician drama and theatrical performances in general needed to be renegotiated.77 As had been the case since the late fifteenth century, however, the central authorities had neither the power nor the wish to completely suppress rhetorical performances. Drijderley Refereynen ghepronuncieert opte Rhetorijck-feest der blauvve Acoleyen van Rotterdam. 1561  […] (Antwerp: Willem Silvius, 1564); and Spelen van Sinne vol schoone allegatien, loflijcke leeringhen ende schriftuerlijcke onderwijsinghen […]. Ghespeelt ende verthoont met octroy der Conincklijcker Mat. binnen die stede van Rotterdam by de neghen Cameren van Rhetorijcken die hem daer ghepresenteert hebben den xx. dach in Julio Anno 1561 (Antwerp: Willem Silvius, 1564). See also Coigneau, ‘Drie Rijnsburgse refereinen te Rotterdam 1561 en hun Franse bron’, Verslagen en Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde, 87 (1977), pp. 239–44. 71 Van Boheemen and Van der Heijden, Met minnen versaemt, pp. 245–48; and Van Dixhoorn, Lustige geesten, p. 247. 72 Van Boheemen and Van der Heijden, Met minnen versaemt, pp. 254–55. 73 Cf.  Ramakers, ‘Tonen en betogen. De dramaturgie van de Rotterdamse Spelen van 1561’, Spiegel der Letteren, 43 (2001), pp. 176–204. 74 Marnef, ‘Chambers of Rhetoric’; and Van Bruaene, ‘Of the King’s Edict’. 75 Van Bruaene, Om beters wille, pp. 174–77. 76 Tweeden Placaet-Bouck inhoudende diversche Ordonnancien, Edicten ende Placaeten van de Coninclicke Ma.ten ende haere deurluchtighe Hoocheden, Graven van Vlaendren, metsgaders van heurliederen Provincialen Raede aldaer, ghepubliceert in den voorghenoemden Lande van Vlaendren t’zedert den Iaere Vyfthien-hondert t’zestich, tot ende metten Iaere zesthien-hondert Negenen-twintich (Ghent: Anna vanden Steene, 1629), pp. 28–30. Cf. Alfons Thijs, Van geuzenstad tot katholiek bolwerk. Antwerpen en de Contrareformatie (Turnhout: Brepols, 1990), pp. 161–62. 77 Van Bruaene, ‘De contouren van een nieuw cultuurmodel. Rederijkers in Vlaanderen en Brabant in de zeventiende eeuw’, Handelingen der Koninklijke Zuid-Nederlandse Maatschappij voor Taal- en Letterkunde en Geschiedenis, 58  (2005), pp. 221–37; and Petra Vanhoutte, ‘De Brugse rederijkerskamer van De Heilige Geest in de zeventiende eeuw: identiteit en representatie’, Jaarboek de Fonteine, 59 (2009), pp. 9–48. 70

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Conclusion This essay has explored the censorship of rhetorician drama in the early modern Low Countries. Treated not as a one-way repressive action but as a complex interaction among various constituencies, censorship is thus exposed as a process in which the values and practices of the different parties involved came together in various ways. That there was a need to set boundaries to dramatic expression was a truth universally acknowledged in the early modern Low Countries. The real question was where these boundaries lay. Rhetoricians themselves were very conscious of the power of verbal (and non-verbal) expression and, therefore, showed a clear concern for defamatory language and blasphemy. At the same time, the transgression of their own rules concerning these matters was an integral part of the rhetorical game. Local authorities, on the other hand, worried mostly about public order, and thus seldom were the chambers of rhetoric considered to be a real threat. Usually, the clergy was also appreciative of rhetorician practices. Of course, things changed significantly with the introduction of Reformed thought around 1520, but even after this date clerical attitudes greatly varied. More research will be needed if we are to get a better grip on the cultural sensibilities of this heterogeneous group, as there were also marked differences in the actions of higher secular authorities. The stance of regional authorities seems to have depended partly on cultural traditions, which can explain why the loudest calls for the repression of rhetorician culture were voiced in the Northern Low Countries, where the movement was probably viewed by some high officials as an undesirable import from the South. Finally, most telling for the ambiguities of censorship in the early modern Low Countries are the actions and strategies of the central authorities. From the late fifteenth century onwards, the court showed an awareness of the potential dangers of the rhetorician movement. This was translated into attempts to set boundaries for vernacular literary expression. Chronologically, the main area of concern evolved from politics in the late fifteenth century, to religion around the middle of the sixteenth century, and then to morality at the beginning of the seventeenth century. But — although some court officials undoubtedly thought otherwise — generally speaking the central authorities never seem to have wanted to completely suppress the performances of the rhetoricians. We must not forget that the chambers of rhetoric had the advantage of being clearly recognizable and respectable institutions that were easier to control than unorganized theatre groups. In addition, the few attempts at direct censorship, such as the institution of a sovereign chamber of rhetoric or bans on holding rhetorical competitions, did not yield many results. Much more efficacious was the court’s strategy to stimulate politically correct and religiously neutral literary expression by sanctioning those performances and texts that were not at odds with official policies. By doing so, state censorship became an agent not in suppressing, but in moulding and — at critical moments — reinventing a rich literary practice.

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Cognitive and Affective Strategies

Continuities or Discontinuities? Exploring Affective Piety in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries Herman Roodenburg Free University of Amsterdam

Introduction In this paper I would like to address a subject that, strictly speaking, does not yet exist: the history of affective piety in the sixteenth-century Low Countries.1 Of course, the notion of affective piety has been employed previously, especially by scholars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. First introduced by Caroline Walker Bynum to describe the new, sentiment-laden devotion that she saw emerging in the twelfth century, the notion was eagerly adopted by other medievalists. No longer construing God as harsh judge, the new piety stressed the humanity and vulnerability of Christ.2 Scholars of the late Middle Ages even speak of a wave of affective piety, finding it most clearly manifested in the period’s passion plays, passion sermons, passion narratives, and passion paintings. Through these particular media (or ‘sensational forms’, to quote anthropologist of religion Birgit Meyer), the devout were urged to empathize with Christ, and with all his physical agony during his last days on earth. His sufferings were often related in the most graphic of details in the passion narratives, the devotional heart of the many vitae Christi. Emerging around 1300 and mostly written in Latin, these ‘lives of Christ’ soon started circulating in the vernacular. They were read and copied all over Europe – from northern Italy, where the first vitae came from, to France, the Lower Rhine, the Low Countries, England, Sweden, and so on. The first passion paintings (and passion sculpture) also surfaced around 1300, all rather dismal images showing Christ’s pale body

I am indebted to Bret Rothstein and Stefan Trinks for their valuable comments on an earlier version of the text. I also would like to thank Ruth Gaskill and Matt Kavaler for correcting my English. 2 Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp.  3–21; cf. Susan Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 63–64, 275, n. 1, on the (French) origins of the concept: Bynum there refers to the work of André Wilmart, Louis Gougaud, Marie Dominique Chenu and André Vauchez. Other medievalists situate the emergence of affective piety even earlier. 1

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 311-328. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114014

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covered with blood and wounds.3 As James Marrow concludes, these blood-soaked images were produced by painters from the Lower Rhine and the Low Countries in particular. His innovative investigations and, more recently, those of José van Aelst, among others, have substantially increased our knowledge of the spread and importance of affective piety in the Low Countries.4 But what do we know about the sixteenth century? Was late medieval piety, with all its emotional and sensory overtones, suddenly gone after 1500, only to re-emerge in a different, less sanguinary guise in the seventeenth century, for instance in the Further Reformation, when the faithful started to sigh and weep again? Or was there perhaps always an undercurrent of affective piety, onto which Willem Teellinck, Gisbertus Voetius, and other leaders of the Further Reformation could graft their own sentiment-laden devotion? One of my current projects is a book that I have provisionally called The Crying Dutchman, a cultural history of the Dutch and their emotions through the ages. I  am enjoying writing it, for in contrast to what Max Weber, Johan Huizinga, and many other scholars have suggested, I  am convinced that the Dutch were mostly a pretty emotional lot, certainly in religiosis, their devotional lives, which constitute the core of the book.5 But I find it difficult to establish what exactly went on in the sixteenth century. We lack such inspiring books as Susan Karant-Nunn’s study on the shaping of religious emotions in Germany or Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen’s study on religion, compassion, and pain in England.6 Perhaps the century was simply a less tearful episode in Dutch history. For instance, in her recent study Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, Judith Pollmann included an interesting chapter called ‘A Pious People’. But we do not find much affective piety there, or perhaps we should consider the frenzied image-breaking of 1566, the annus horribilis, as an expression of such piety, of wishing to strip the images of the power they still held over the iconoclasts, as David Freedberg suggested many years ago.7 Pollmann rightly emphasizes that the Catholic Church continued to flourish after 1500. She notes ‘an abundance of religious life’ in the Low Countries, which only came to be affected in the 1520s when the faithful started to explore more evangelical views. They developed a more inward engagement with the Passion and a growing need for For the most important studies on the period’s affective piety, see Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia 1996); Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Mitchell Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 4 James Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (Kortrijk: Van Ghemmert, 1979); see also his essay, ‘“Circumdederunt Me Canes Multi”: Christ’s Tormentors in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance’, The Art Bulletin 59 (1977), pp. 2, 167–81; José van Aelst, Passie voor het lijden. De ‘Hundert Betrachtungen und Begehrungen’ van Henricus Suso en de oudste drie bewerkingen uit de Nederlanden (Leuven: Peeters, 2005); Vruchten van de passie. De laatmiddeleeuwse passieliteratuur verkend aan de hand van Suso’s ‘Honderd artikelen’ (Hilversum: Verloren, 2011). 5 Johan Huizinga, Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century and Other Essays (London: Collins, 1968). 6 Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling; Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2012). 7 David Freedberg, ‘The Structure of Byzantine and European Iconoclasm’, in A. Bryer and J. Herrin, eds, Iconoclasm (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, Centre for Byzantine Studies, 1977), p.  169; Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives (Maarssen: Gary Schwartz, 1985); cf. Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1993). 3

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‘scripturality’ – for rationally understanding the pure Gospel. They also developed a concomitant distrust of ‘ceremonies’ and image worship, with all its broad affectivity denounced by Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin alike.8 But how radical was this break? Was the Christ-centred affectivity of late medieval piety, with all its corporeal and sensory dimensions, suddenly broken off ? What actually happened to the passion narratives and all the passion paintings, passion sermons, and passion plays? Was the sixteenth indeed a less tearful century? We know that the Low Countries never saw the likes of Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), Filippo Neri (1515– 1595), or Lorenzo of Brindisi (1559–1619), whose sermons could last for six hours or more, simply because they could not stop crying (Lorenzo even dropping one handkerchief after the other from the pulpit). In a letter to Loyola the Dutch Jesuit Nicholas Goudanus (c. 1517–1565) even complained that he had never had this ‘gift of tears’.9 But does that mean that Catholic or other preachers in the Netherlands shed fewer tears at the pulpit and that the faithful remained dry-eyed as well? In the following pages I would like just to mark a few contours of the century’s affective piety, focusing on the rhetorics involved – the ‘pathopoeia’, the crafting of the believers’ emotions. I will look at the period’s passion narratives and passion paintings in particular.10 Central to all affective piety, one might argue, is the forming of good inner images through the contemplation of good outer images. Classical rhetoric was essential here. What seems to have changed in the sixteenth century is that Christ’s Passion did not so much lessen its emotional as its sensory hold over the faithful. The new, Protestant forms of affective piety would tone down their appeal to the human sensorium, the sense of touch in particular. To trace these contours it will be helpful to bring in a broader perspective, one which will allow us to include the period’s emotional and sensory cultures, and to get beyond the limitations of merely language-based analyses which cannot really inform us on issues of performativity and emotional response. I am especially interested in what anthropologist Birgit Meyer has described as a religion’s ‘sensational forms’ – the authorized modes, strongly involving the senses and the emotions, for invoking and recognizing access to the transcendental. Meyer understands religion as ‘a practice of mediation between the levels of humans and God’, and it is this metaphysical distance between the two levels which may be bridged by particular sensational forms.11 For example, whereas late medieval Catholicism promoted strongly embodied forms of icon veneration, the Devotio Moderna and the Reformers generally preferred different embodied practices such as private prayer, bible-reading, and listening to the sermon. As Meyer explains, ‘these forms are central to generating religious sensations through which what is not “there” and “present” in an Judith Pollmann, Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1520–1635 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 29–31, 38–41. 9 Joseph Imorde, Affektübertragung (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2004), pp. 60–65, 86–92; on Goudanus, see pp. 76–78. 10 For interesting work on the tearfulness of passion drama, see Susie Speakman Sutch and Anne-Laure van Bruaene, ‘The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary: Devotional Communication and Politics in the Burgundian-Habsburg Low Countries’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 6  (2010), 2, pp.  252–78; Jennifer Hammerschmidt, ‘Beyond Vision: The Impact of Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross, in W. de Boer and C. Göttler, eds, Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), pp. 201–18. 11 Birgit Meyer, Religious Sensations: Why Media, Aesthetics and Power Matter in the Study of Contemporary Religion (Amsterdam: VU University, 2006), pp. 9, 13, and passim. 8

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ordinary way can be experienced – over and over again – as available and accessible.’12 In other words, by creating a heightened emotional and sensory engagement with the divine, these forms make it materialize not only in images or texts but also in things, smells, sounds or bodies.13 Of course, with Protestantism professing an essentially unknowable God, the sensational forms changed accordingly. Similarly, Meyer likes to speak of the ‘aesthetics of persuasion’, which is responsible for what she calls the ‘truth effects’ of religion, for making the faithful sense the presence of God in a seemingly immediate manner – just think of a charismatic preacher, for example Lorenzo of Brindisi and his extraordinary gift of tears. Through its specific aesthetics of persuasion, a religion can successfully resonate with the bodily habitus, the senses, emotions, and lived experience of the faithful.14 Of course in both Catholicism and Protestantism, classical rhetoric, with its prominent interest in crafting the emotions of any audience, played an important role in such aesthetics. Cicero, Horace, Quintilian, and the anonymous treatise Ad Herennium, the most important source on rhetoric in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were a major influence.15 The Sixteenth Century: Affective Piety and the Rederijkers In a recent essay, Bart Ramakers employed an interesting performance perspective in his analysis of two rederijkersspelen, or rhetoricians’ plays.16 Other scholars have often sought to interpret the plays from a strictly semiotic point of view. In its search for the plays’ confessional signature – Which might be viewed as expressing Catholic values or as already expressing Protestant ones? – research has tended to concentrate just on the texts and on the religious points of view defended by the various allegorical characters, or ‘personifications’, of which the authors of the rederijkersspelen were so fond. But as Ramakers argues, such logocentric analyses overlook the fact that the personifications Birgit Meyer, ‘Mediating Absence – Effecting Spiritual Presence: Pictures and the Christian Imagination’, Social Research 78 (2011) p. 1037. 13 Meyer’s ideas may be compared to Walker Bynum’s latest book, Christian Materiality, in which she explores how late medieval religion ‘happened’ in material culture, in the period’s multiplication of devotional objects: Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York 2011); cf. the innovative journal Material Religion, co-founded by Meyer. On the ‘corporeal’ or ‘phenomenological’ turn, which informs not only Meyer’s work but that of many cultural anthropologists (and now increasingly also that of cultural historians), see for example: Herman Roodenburg, Anthropologists, Historians and the Pulse of the Archive (Amsterdam: VU University, 2010). For some excellent recent work on religion and the senses, see Matthew Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); De Boer and Göttler, Religion and the Senses; see also Herman Roodenburg, ed., A Cultural History of the Senses in the Renaissance (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 14 Birgit Meyer and Jojada Verrips, ‘Aesthetics’, in David Morgan, ed., Key Words in Religion, Media and Culture (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 21. 15 On the Rhetorica’s importance to late medieval rhetoric and its engagement with the believers’ emotions, see Peter Parshall, ‘The Art of Memory and the Passion’, The Art Bulletin 81  (1999), pp.  456–72; Christine Göttler, Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform (Turnhout 2010), pp.  64–67; Kimberly  A. Rivers, Preaching the Memory of Virtue and Vice: Memory, Images, and Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 314–20. On its general importance to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, see Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 70–71. James J. Murphy, ‘Topos and Figura: Historical Cause and Effect?’, in: G. L. Bursill-Hall a.o., eds, De Ortu Grammaticae: Studies in Medieval Grammar and Linguistic Theory in Memory of Jan Pinborg (Amsterdam 1990), p. 241. 16 Bart Ramakers, Spelen en figuren. Toneelkunst en processiecultuur tussen Middeleeuwen en Moderne Tijd (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996); Ramakers, ‘Eloquent Presence: Verbal and Visual Discourse in the Ghent Plays of 1539’, in C. Brusati, K. Enenkel, and W. Melion, eds, The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 218–62. 12

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conduct a kind of Ciceronian dialogue, merely providing food for thought. Thus the plays did not defend any confessional sympathies – they were more subtle and more persuasive than that.17 Instead, Ramakers emphasizes that the plays were received first and foremost by an audience watching and hearing the actors perform. As he writes, the plays constituted ‘a sensory experience that cannot be accounted for in a semiotic system’, hence his wish to include ‘a phenomenology of their sounds and images’ or, in the words of B. O. States, ‘to “exaggerate” the medium of drama, its affective corporeality as the carrier of meanings’.18 Ramakers focuses especially on what he calls the characters’ ‘eloquent presence’, a concept not unlike Birgit Meyer’s ‘aesthetics of persuasion’. For instance, like Meyer, he refers to the Aristotelian notion of ‘aesthesis’: humans’ capacity to perceive the world with their five senses and to comprehend it through these perceptions. He also relates the characters’ affective corporeality to principles of classical and medieval oratory.19 Ramakers selected two rederijkersspelen performed in 1539 at a famous contest in Ghent: a play staged by the chamber of rhetoric of Kaprijke, a small town in Flanders, and another play staged by the chamber of Antwerp. In addition, he concentrated on only one of the personifications, the Mankind character, who is the protagonist in both plays. As always at such contests, the participating chambers had to answer a question phrased in advance by the host chamber. In Ghent the question was: ‘What is the greatest comfort for man dying?’ The answer in both the Kaprijke and Antwerp play was provided by the Mankind character, but it did not merely emerge in the lines he spoke. It was also revealed by his actio – his postures, gestures, and facial expressions – for it is the Mankind character himself who is going to die, and he knows it. He laments his sinful life and expresses his despair and anxiety both through his words and through his body. As Ramakers concludes, rather than offering a theological model, the two plays presented a devotional, corporeal, and also highly emotional model to the audience: how to die peacefully. The dying man is even confronted with various tableaux vivants – living images – which carry him (and with him the audience) back to the events of biblical times. The contemplation of these images, in particular those staged at the end of the play, moves the poor man deeply, thus constructing his inner disposition and eventually providing him and the audience with the answer: the greatest comfort for man dying is his trust in salvation.20 I believe Ramakers’ performance approach enriches our understanding of the rederijkersspelen in two important ways. We learn that their staging may have roused the strongest of emotions among their audience – these were far more than just verbal discourses. And we start to understand how these emotions were constructed not only through hearing but also through a rather corporeal way of seeing, Bob Scribner’s sakramentale Schau, to which Ramakers also refers, thus reminding us of the affective piety of

Ramakers, ‘Eloquent Presence’, pp. 220–21; cf. Pollmann, Catholic Identity, p. 41. Ramakers, ‘Eloquent Presence’, pp. 222, 225. The quotation is from Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 27. 19 Ramakers, ‘Eloquent Presence’, pp. 222–24. 20 Ramakers, ‘Eloquent Presence’, p. 258. 17 18

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the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.21 Both the Kaprijke and the Antwerp play centre on outer and inner images or rather, to quote Thomas Lentes, on constructing good inner images through contemplating good outer images.22 The plays were about constructing inwardness: strongly appealing to the senses and the emotions, they possessed distinctly devotional qualities. That the rederijkersspelen sought to move the hearts of the spectators – that docere always implied movere – emerges also from the Const van Rhetoriken, written by the rhetorician Matthijs de Castelein but published only posthumously, in 1555. Drawing on classical oratory, De Castelein stresses the importance of actors making their audiences sigh and weep through their own sighing and weeping – Horace’s famous advice, ‘if you want me to cry you must first feel grief yourself ’ (si vis me flere dolendum est primum ipsi tibi). In a fine essay, Dirk Coigneau traces such lachrymose delivery in many of the plays staged by the chambers of rhetoric. He also notes the more general impact of classical oratory, of actors always having to strive for ‘vividness’ in their performances – for demonstratio or evidentia – and through such sensory techniques work the emotions of their audiences.23 De Castelein, we might say, knew about ‘pathopoeia’ – about the importance of ‘aesthesis’ and the aesthetics of persuasion. The Late Middle Ages: Affective Piety and the Passion Narratives Like the rederijkersspelen, late medieval passion narratives sought to rouse the emotions of the faithful through processes of mental visualization – through their contemplation of good outer images. But there is one striking difference. The visualizing was of a much more bodily and sensory nature, especially where the faithful were urged to imagine all the cruel acts done to Christ’s innocent body.24 The passion narratives amply portrayed that cruelty, from Christ’s arrest in the garden of Gethsemane to his horrifying death on the cross. The most popular narratives, those produced in the vernacular, emerged only in the course of the fourteenth century. But nearly all of them were adaptations of earlier texts, among them the Meditationes

Bob Scribner, ‘Das visuelle in der Volksfrömmigkeit’, in Scribner, ed., Bilder und Bildersturm im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1990), p.  14; Scribner, ‘Vom Sakralbild zur sinnlichen Schau. Sinnliche Wahrnehmung und das Visuelle bei der Objektivierung des Frauenkörpers in Deutschland im 16. Jahrhundert’, in K. Schreiner und N. Schnitzler, eds, Gepeinigt, Begehrt, Vergessen. Symbolik und Sozialbezug des Körpers im späten Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Fink, 1992), p.  311. See also Norbert Schnitzler, ‘Täuschung und schöner Schein. Probleme der Bilderverehrung im späten Mittelalter’, in K.  Schreiner, ed., Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter. Politisch-soziale Kontexte, visuelle Praxis, körperliche Ausdrucksformen (Munich: Fink, 2002), pp. 221–42. 22 Thomas Lentes, ‘Inneres Auge, Äusserer Blick und Heilige Schau. Ein Diskussionsbeitrag zur visuellen Praxis im Frömmigkeit und Moraldidaxe des späten Mittelalters’, in K.  Schreiner, ed., Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter. Politisch-Soziale Konzepte, visuelle Praxis, körperliche Ausdrucksformen (Munich: Fink, 2002), esp. pp. 180–91. 23 Dirk Coigneau, ‘Emotions and Rhetoric in Rederijker Drama’, in E. Lecuppre-Desjardins and A.-L. Van Bruaene, eds, Emotions in the Heart of the City (14th-16th Centuries) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 243–56; According to the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium (c. 85 bc), demonstratio meant ‘that the subject is portrayed in such a way that the event and the thing itself appear before our eyes’. Similarly, Quintilian (c. 35 - c. 96 ad) defined evidentia as making the audience participate as if it were present at the event. For an excellent discussion of both concepts, see Heinrich F. Plett, Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012). 24 For a fuller treatment of the following, see Herman Roodenburg, ‘Empathy in the Making: Crafting the Believer’s Emotions in the Late Medieval Low Countries’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen tot de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 129 (2014), 2, 42–62. 21

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Vitae Christi by Iohannes de Caulibus (c. 1300), the Vita Jesu Christi attributed (but not correctly) to Michael de Massa (d. 1336), and another Vita Christi by Ludolf of Saxony (c. 1350). In addition, there were texts written directly in the vernacular, like the Hundert Betrachtungen und Begehrungen by Heinrich Suso. Most of these older texts were fairly short, but their adaptations were not. Finding an eager audience among the religious, nuns in particular, and increasingly among a laity which (like most nuns) did not master Latin, the narratives were copied, adapted, and constantly read, both individually and in company, throughout Europe. They are still a fascinating read, for in their rendering of the Passion the authors did not hesitate to include all kinds of gruesome detail. Yet few of these details – all classical rhetorical instances of vividness, of demonstratio or evidentia – were ever mentioned in the Gospels. In the Netherlands the narratives circulated widely as well. José van Aelst has traced some 112 manuscripts and two printed editions of the North Netherlandish adaptation of Suso’s Hundert Betrachtungen alone. Most of the manuscripts were produced in the province of Holland, the town of Delft in particular.25 Another popular text was T’Leven ons Heren Ihesu Christi, an early fifteenth-century adaptation of the Meditationes and the Vita Jesu Christi, ascribed to De Massa. So far, eighty-two manuscripts have been traced, of which at least thirty-six were owned by female readers; it also saw a printed edition, published in 1479, again in Delft.26 Other ‘lives’ found a wide readership thanks to the printing press, among them Tboeck vanden leven Jhesu Christi, with twelve editions between 1487 and 1536, and Dat leven ons liefs heren Jhesu Christi, with twenty-five editions between 1497 and 1532. Remarkably, both books did not first see a manuscript tradition before they appeared in print. They also borrowed relatively little from Ludolf ’s Vita Christi or from the other Latin narratives.27 Undoubtedly inspired by the narratives, many of the violent scenes which they related were also rendered in painting. Artists from the Lower Rhine and the Low Countries in particular produced all kinds of images representing the suffering Christ, his wounds bleeding while his tormentors humiliate, batter, or torture him. Netherlandish painters of such images included such established artists as Hans Memling (c. 1433–1494, figure  1), Aelbrecht Bouts (c.  1455–1549, figure  2), Geertgen tot Sint Jans (c.  1465– 1495, figure 3), and, relatively late, Jan Sanders van Hemessen (c. 1500–1566, figure 4). Like the authors of the narratives, the artists almost seem to revel in the violence done to their Saviour. Esther Cohen, looking at Europe as a whole, even speaks of the period’s ‘philopassionism’, a valorization of even the fiercest pain as spiritually meaningful and productive; Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises still represented that tradition.28 Only in Italy did most painters prefer a more gentle rendering of Christ’s ordeal. The Italian artists Van Aelst, Passie voor het lijden; idem, Vruchten van de passie, pp. 40, 264–67. Geert Warnar, ‘Tleven ons heren Jesu Christi: Female Readers and Dutch Devotional Literature in the Fifteenth Century’, in M. van Dijk and R. Nijp, eds, Saints, Scholars and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 25–42; August den Hollander, ‘Middelnederlandse Levens van Jezus’, in A. den Hollander, E. Kwakkel and W. Scheepsma, eds, Middelnederlandse bijbelvertalingen (Hilversum: Verloren, 2007), 189; Anna Dlabacová, ‘Drukken en publieksgroepen. Productie en receptie van gedrukte Middelnederlandse meditatieve Levens van Jezus (ca. 1479–1540)’, Ons Geestelijk Erf 79, 4 (2008), pp. 323–30. 27 For this incunabular period, see Koen Goudriaan, ‘Nederlandstalige meditatieve levens van Jezus op de vroege drukpers. Een terreinverkenning’, Spiegel der Letteren 49, 2 (2007), pp. 143–64; Dlabacová, ‘Drukken en publieksgroepen’. 28 Esther Cohen, ‘Towards a History of European Physical Sensibility: Pain in the Later Middle Ages’, Science in Context, 8 (1995), p. 54; cf. Van Dijkhuizen, Pain and Compassion, p. 24. 25 26

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Fig. 1: Aelbrecht Bouts, Man of Sorrows, c. 1490, oil on wood, 37,9 × 26,5 cm. Cambridge MA, Harvard Art Museums/ Fogg Museum, The Kate, Maurice R. and Melvin R. Seiden Special Purchase Fund in Honor of Seymour and Zoya Alive, 2001.70. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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Fig. 2: Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Man of Sorrows, c. 1490, oil on wood, 24 × 24,5 cm. Utrecht, Rijksmuseum Het Catharijne Convent.

included almost no blood; indeed, a contemporary could not help complaining that the tormentors in Sebastiano del’Piombo’s Flagellation seem to handle soft cotton ropes.29 Most of the scenes depicted by the Netherlandish painters are easy to recognize. The flagellation, the crowning with thorns, the bearing of the cross and the crucifixion, of course, are all described in the Gospels. But there are also scenes which look completely unfamiliar: images of tormentors (all of them Jews, as the preachers emphasized) pulling out Christ’s hair and beard; throwing him to the ground and beating him; torturing him in an underground chamber; plunging him into a muddy cesspool; or even squeezing him in a winepress. 29

François Quiviger, The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 67.

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Fig. 3: Hans Memling, The Man of Sorrows in the Arms of the Virgin, 1475–79. Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria.

In his masterly survey of this art, Marrow could simply arrange his chapters in order of one such curious narrative after the other.30 He could also explain where all these 30

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Fig. 4: Jan Sanders van Hemessen, The Mocking of Christ, 1544, oil on wood, 123 × 102,5 cm. Munich, Alte Pinakothek. © bps I Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.

stories came from: turning to the passion narratives, Marrow demonstrated how in these texts all kinds of imagery – such as prophecies, metaphors, symbols, or allegories deriving from the Old Testament – had been transformed into realistic scenes and details, thereby following a long exegetical tradition. Recently, Tobias Kemper also investigated the narratives’ account of the crucifixion (which Marrow did not include) and found that the graphic scenes and details also derived from other sources, such as the New Testament

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Fig. 5: Master of Mary of Burgundy. Flemish (active 1467–80 in Bruges), Mary of Burgundy’s Book of Hours, illumination on parchment. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

apocrypha or the veneration of the ‘instruments’ of Christ’s Passion, the ‘arma Christi’. In the thirteenth century some of these alleged relics, including a ‘holy nail’, were brought from Constantinople to Paris and to other places.31 Most interesting, however, is that all of these moving details seem to answer to a late medieval ‘aesthetics of persuasion’, in which notions of ‘vividness’ (probably based on the anonymous Ad Herennium text, which was known throughout the Middle Ages) were of prime importance. In other words, the late medieval passion narratives and passion paintings already employed a ‘pathopoeia’ aimed at transporting the devout back in time, as if they were actually witnessing the Passion and were physically present on the spot during each of its episodes. A famous pictorial example is a miniature in the Book of Hours of Mary of Burgundy (1457–1482), in which the worshipper has just stepped from the frame into the picture, leaving her devotional instruments, her book of hours and a rosary (including a scented pomander), behind (figure 5). According to Lentes, such mental visualization was a main element of all late medieval devotional exercises. Drawing on the Meditationes Vitae Christi and Ludolf of Saxony’s Vita Christi, he describes how in this period the believer’s inner person – his imago Dei – was construed as some sort of screen onto which good and bad images were continuously projected. Of course, the bad images should be driven out, which the believer could accomplish through meditating on good images – in particular, on images of the Passion which Tobias A. Kemper, Die Kreuzigung Christi. Motivgeschichtliche Studien zu lateinischen und deutschen Passionstraktaten des Spätmittelalters (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006); cf. Robert Sukale, ‘Arma Christi: Überlegungen zur Zeichenhaftigkeit mittelalterlicher Andachtsbilder’, Städel-Jahrbuch n.s. 6 (1977), pp. 177–208.

31

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could purify the screen. By gazing on Christ and taking in his image as intensely as possible, the individual believer might eventually become the spitting image of Christ himself.32 Of course, the Protestants condemned the whole notion of Werkheiligkeit – of working one’s own salvation. They again strove to widen the distance between God and his children, leaving little room for agency or for effective practices of mediation. Accordingly, the greatest comfort for the dying Mankind character in both the Kaprijke and the Antwerp play was his final realization that, because of Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection, he might at least hope for justification. At the same time, as pointed out by Ramakers, the outer images – the tableaux vivants – were essential in constructing the man’s inwardness, his inner images or imago Dei.33 To put it differently, the living images of the rederijkersspelen may have functioned in ways similar to the devotional images gazed and meditated upon during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Yet one discontinuity stands out. In their focus on all the cruelties – on all the grabbing, man-handling, and wounding of Christ – the practices of late medieval visualization were of a much more sensory nature. To bring out this tactility, let us turn to one ‘vita Christi’ in particular, the Devote oefeninge der kijnsheit, des middels ende des eyndes ons Heren Christi, which was written by a Franciscan priest from the Low Countries, Johannes Brugman (c.  1400–1473). Brugman, who was famed for his impassioned preaching and was a friend to the Brothers of the Common Life, probably wrote the text in the 1460s at the request of a nun or semi-religious woman.34 With the exception of its third and longest section – the one describing the Passion – much of the Oefeninge may be traced back to the Arbor Vitae Crucifixae Jesu, a narrative by the Italian Franciscan Ubertino de Casale (1259– 1329). Brugman himself refers to Bonaventure’s Lignum Vitae and to Bridget of Sweden’s Revelations, though the Meditationes and Ludolf ’s Vita may have been important as well.35 Brugman’s ‘Life of Christ’ Brugman certainly emphasized the physical agony of God’s son.36 Depicting the violence done to Christ in episode after episode, the author urged his readers to use their visual imaginations: to actually hear what happened (the sound of the nails hammered into Christ’s hands and feet); and even to smell what took place (the scent of the evil-smelling gobs spat into Christ’s face). As the editor of the text, the nineteenth-century church historian Willem Moll concluded, ‘the whole design of Brugman’s little book aims to induce the reader not only to mere contemplation but to a clear and almost sensory vision of what he relates’.37 That was not a compliment, and neither was, some sixty years later, Johan Huizinga’s amazement at all such devotional forms. Lentes, ‘Inneres Auge’. See also: Nelleke Moser, De strijd voor rhetorica. Poëtica en positie van rederijkers in Vlaanderen, Brabant, Zeeland en Holland tussen 1450 en 1620 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001). 34 Brugman, ‘Devote oefeninge’, p. 288. 35 P. Optatus, ‘De invloed van Hubertinus van Casale’ op Het Leven van Jezus door J. B., Ons Geestelijk Erf 23 (1949) pp. 315–34, 427–34; Brugman, Oefeninge, pp. 296, 355. 36 The text was edited in 1854 by the Dutch church historian Willem Moll and was included as ‘Brugmans “Leven van Jezus”’ in his study on Brugman. See Willem Moll, Johannes Brugman en het godsdienstig leven onzer vaderen in de vijftiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Portielje, 1854), appendix VII. 37 Moll, Johannes Brugman, p. 58: ‘De gehele vorm van Brugman’s boekske is er op ingerigt, om de lezer niet slechts tot bloote overdenkingen te leiden, maar tot eene klare en bijna zinnelijke aanschouwing van wat hij verhaalt.’ 32 33

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Let me provide a few examples from Brugman’s account of the crucifixion, both interspersed with a nasty tactility. In the first episode we are told about Christ’s second, utterly agonizing unclothing, when his clothes stuck to the wounds of the flagellation (for which he had been unclothed before). The preacher exclaims: ‘Oh, how cruelly are his clothes pulled off, which, sticky as they were, still clung to that bloody, wounded body, and how wretchedly he starts bleeding again!’ No less gripping – or awfully vivid – is the next episode, the actual crucifixion: ‘Let us with heavy heart, with crying eyes and with bloody tears behold how the blessed hands are nailed through with blunt nails, after which the holy feet [are] so wretchedly pierced through and cut through that his holy bones may burst’. Brugman then concludes the scene with one of his apostrophes, addressing Mary and the other holy women standing by: ‘Oh Mary, thou who saw how his clothes were pulled off and that the instruments of his passion were prepared, and heard this hammering of the nails, and might well imagine the bursting and tearing apart of the legs and veins, oh warm-hearted mother, how you must have felt, hearing this, and [you] other ardent and pious hearts!’38 Again, the tactility here is striking: Christ’s body is grabbed, manhandled, wounded, and deformed. In many passion narratives we even read that his face had been beaten beyond all recognition such that Mary, standing along the road to Golgotha, could recognize her son only by his voice. Christ’s humanity had been deformed to the point of inhumanity. Brugman’s Oefeninge was only one of many vitae Christi produced in the Low Countries, but it was certainly not the most spectacular, the most violent or affective, of its kind – earlier texts reveal an even greater ‘philopassionism’. Nor did Brugman advise his audience to adopt specific postures or gestures when meditating on the Passion, at least not in his Oefeninge.39 Such instructions were not uncommon, however. One of the other manuscripts studied by Moll was a Middle Dutch translation of the Meditationes de Passione Christi by the German Augustinian Jordan of Quedlinburg (c. 1300–1370/80). As Moll disapprovingly noted, after each episode the text included an exhortation headed in red with the word medevormicheit. In these exhortations the author suggested how his readers might practice such ‘conformitas’ – how they might literally imitate Christ in his condition or actions as related in the episode. For instance, after reading or hearing how Christ, mourning in Gethsemane, bent his face down to the ground, they may do the same, ‘and from compassion and love shed as much as one can the tears of Christ’. Or, having related how Christ was hit on the chin, the text continues: ‘if someone contemplating this article wishes to conform to it, he may hit himself on the chin for the sake of Christ’.40 In the same vein, Jordan’s contemporary, Ludolf of Saxony, suggested to his readers that they might box their ‘Brugmans “Leven van Jezus”’, pp. 363–64: ‘Och hoe wredelicken worden him sine cledere uutghetogen, die ghedroghet waren ende ghebacken waren an dat blodighe, gewonde lichaem, ende hoe yamerlick wert hi weder op nye bloedende!’ […] ‘so laet ons doch mit bedructer herten, mit screyende oghen ende mit bloedighen tranen sien, hoe die ghebenedide handen mit plompen nagelen doerghenegelt worden, ende daerna die heilige voeten so yamerliken doormoerdet ende doergraven dat syn heilige beenen bersten mochten. O  Maria, ghi die saget dat hem sijn cleder uut en ghetogen waren ende dat die instrumenten sijnre passien bereyt waren, ende hoerde dat incloppen der nagelen, ende wal bedenken moeghet die berstinghe ende scoringhe der benen ende der aderen, och hertelike moeder, hoe mochte u doe te moede wesen, hoe ghi dit hoerden ende anderen ynnighen, devoten herten!’ 39 In his Devotus Tractatus, also written between 1450 and 1470 but only for his fellow Franciscans, Brugman did include gestural and postural instructions. See edition of the Tractatus in: F. A. H. van den Hombergh, Leven en werk van Jan Brugman O.  F.  M. (c.  1400–1473) (Groningen: Wolters, 1967), pp.  221–22. Perhaps he deemed such exercises less appropriate for the religious and semi-religious women he addressed in his Oefeninge. 40 Moll, Johannes Brugman, pp. 75–76. 38

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Fig. 6: Rogier van der Weyden, The Descent from the Cross, c. 1435, oil on oak panel, 220 × 262 cm. Madrid, Museo del Prado.

own ears when Christ was hit on his ear; that they might scourge themselves when Christ was scourged; or that their limbs might form a cross to articulate both their inner and outer conformitas to Christ crucified.41 Among the pictorial examples of such medevormicheit is Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross, already highly praised in his lifetime. As art historians have often pointed out, there is a striking conformity between Mary’s swooning body and that of her son taken down from the cross (figure 6). The Seventeenth Century: Affective Piety and Rembrandt’s Passion Cycle Let us finally have a look at Rembrandt’s Passion Cycle – five quite remarkable paintings which he limned in the 1630s, the decade bringing him fame and fortune. The cycle was ordered by prince Frederik Hendrik of Orange with the help of the poet and courtier Constantijn Huygens, Rembrandt’s early discoverer. What strikes one immediately in the five paintings is that Rembrandt substantially reduced the narrative, which starts at the end – with the events on Golgotha. The first scene represents the Raising of the Cross, not the arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane (figure 7), and nowhere did the Cycle’s viewers see Christ insulted, mocked, or spit upon; beaten, flagellated, and crowned with thorns;

Thomas Lentes, ‘Andacht und Gebärde. Das religiöse Ausdrucksverhalten’, in B. Jussen and C. Koslofsky, eds, Kulturelle Reformation. Sinnformationen im Umbruch, 1400–1600 (Göttingen; Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1999), pp. 54 ff.

41

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Fig. 7: Rembrandt van Rijn, The Raising of the Cross, 1633, oil on canvas, 96,2 × 72,2 cm. Munich, Alte Pinakothek. © bps I Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.

or, struggling his way up to Golgotha, collapsing under the weight of the cross. Most importantly, all the haptic visuality of the fifteenth century is no longer there. Those who had the privilege to view the Cycle – the monarchs, nobles and diplomats visiting the court of Orange – were spared all the grabbing and beating as well as all the bloody violence done 326

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to Christ’s body. Similarly, they were shown the Raising of the Cross but not the details preceding it – the second undressing and the hammering of nails into Christ’s hands and feet. Indeed, these viewers could no longer identify with Christ or even his mother, as neither of their faces reach out emotionally. Rembrandt even made it difficult to recognize Mary such that one wonders where she stands or sits. Yet these five paintings’ emotional hold may have been as strong as that of the late medieval scenes. As Karant-Nunn has written, the God of Calvin was once again a distant and righteous God. He was separated from all of his children by an unbridgeable metaphorical space, though he could occasionally reach down to test them or to assuage their fears – which were substantial. The minds of Calvinists were bent on regret and self-abasement, for they had been taught that it was not the Jews but their own sinful lives that caused Christ to suffer and suffer again – what Erwin Panofsky in his study on Dürer described as the ‘perpetual passion’.42 If they were horrified about what the villains did to him, they should be as horrified about their own villainy and permanent state of corruption. Christ bore his sufferings for their salvation, but they could in no way – not via any empathizing with Christ – procure his intercession. They could only beseech God to have mercy upon them.43 Interestingly, as Shelley Perlove and Larry Silver have shown, such self-denigration for personal sin features in contemporary poetry which may have inspired Constantijn Huygens. Huygens was an admirer of John Donne, the famous poet and dean at St Paul’s in London. Around 1630 he even translated nineteen of Donne’s poems, which he had acquired in manuscript form, including his ‘Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward’. Perhaps Huygens discussed the poem with Rembrandt. The speaker of the poem is a traveller on horseback, riding westward, as he deems himself emotionally and spiritually unworthy to effectively gaze on Christ. He begs that God punish him, restore him in His image, so that one day he will be able to face his Redeemer. Using Donne’s poem, Perlove and Silver pointed to the man on horseback depicted so prominently in the Raising of the Cross. He does not gaze on Christ; instead, his sad eyes look away, at us. Of course, we also recognize Rembrandt himself, helping to raise the cross. He is hic et nunc on the spot, not as a witness standing by, nor as a co-sufferer experiencing all the physical pain of Christ, but unmistakably as one of his executioners, a fine pictorial illustration of the ‘perpetual Passion’. In the Descent from the Cross, perhaps viewers were given some hope, as we see Rembrandt again, helping to lower the corpse. Christ’s strongly lit body seems to radiate on the painter, though his face remains in the dark. As Van Dijkhuizen writes, Donne ‘felt drawn to both Catholic and Reformed models of pain’, a hybrid position between literal compassion – wishing to co-suffer with Christ – and realizing – with the Reformers – that Christ’s divinity never coincided with his physical suffering and that the whole idea of shared pain leading to salvation was sheer blasphemy.44 Other Protestant writers in England echoed that stance, as did Protestants writers in the Dutch Republic such as Daniel Heinsius, Jacob Revius, and Jeremias de Decker, all of them – like the late medieval authors and Loyola – again dwelling on Christ’s physical ordeal but also separating his divinity from his agonized body so that 42 43 44

Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), pp. 138–39. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling, p. 252. Dijkhuizen, Pain and Compassion, pp. 40, 113.

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there was no hope for any emotional or bodily identification between viewer or reader and Christ himself.45 This, then, was a different affective piety, one likely as emotionally charged as its late medieval and Counter-Reformation forms, but with the possibility of physical co-suffering excised. It was grafted, instead, on a decidedly less sensory, less tactile ‘pathopoeia’.

45

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Perlove and Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith, pp. 292–94; cf. Van Dijkhuizen, Pain and Compassion, pp. 64–65.

The Timanthes Effect Another Note on the Historical Explanation of Pictures* Koenraad Jonckheere Ghent University

Introduction In his Historia Naturalis, Pliny the Elder describes a contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Zeuxis was a painter working in Athens in the fifth century bc; Parrhasius of Ephesus was his main artistic rival. The two painters were believed to be the two best living artists, and in order to settle the debate over which of them was the superior artist, a contest was organized. Each artist was to make a painting and these would be judged on the basis of which artwork was the most lifelike. Zeuxis revealed his panel first. He had painted grapes so convincing and inviting that birds immediately flew down from the sky to peck at them. Proudly, Zeuxis then asked Parrhasius to slip the curtain of his painting, only to discover that it was a trompe-l’oeil instead of an actual drape. Zeuxis immediately admitted that he had lost the contest and warm-heartedly congratulated Parrhasius on his triumph.1 Pliny’s story is a wonderful metaphor of human visual cognition. While Zeuxis had indeed deceived the birds, Parrhasius deceived Zeuxis — the most famous artist — by tricking him into trusting his patterns of expectation such that he discovered his own medium, the visual arts, to have betrayed him. Indeed, Zeuxis was looking for something that lay beyond the curtain — he was unconsciously searching for the ‘un-depicted’. The painter who was renowned for seeing every minor flaw in his own work had been misled by the illusion of a simple curtain because he blindly trusted his patterns of expectation.2 Stories about visual perception and deceit have been a commonplace in art history since the days of Pliny.3 They have been recounted, paraphrased, and interpreted by many

I would like to thank Amyrose McCue Gill and the editors of this volume for their helpful comments. Pliny, Naturalis Historia, trans. by H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 35. 145. Recent writing on Pliny’s story includes Sarah Blake McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance: The Legacy of the Natural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p.  47; and Stijn Bussels, The Animated Image: Roman Theory on Naturalism, Vividness and Divine Power (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012), passim. 2 Pliny also recounts the story (Naturalis Historia, 35.66) of Zeuxis criticizing one of his own paintings, namely a boy holding grapes. Again the birds came to peck at them, but Pliny considered the work a failure because the boy was apparently not lifelike enough to scare the birds. 3 McHam, Pliny, pp. 255–87. For Pliny’s impact on Netherlandish art theory, see especially Walter S. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel Van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), passim. * 1

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 329-351. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114015

Koenraad Jonckheere

as an illustration of the mimetic power of art. For instance, Hans Vredeman de Vries — the Parrhasius of the Low Countries, according to Van Mander — deceived the Prince of Orange with his ‘perspectives’ in Gillis Hooftman’s courtyard.4 Moreover, in the age of iconoclasm, many believed works of art to be living miracle workers, images that were literally animated.5 Yet Pliny’s account is more than a naïve tale about illusion in the visual arts. It is also the story of a spontaneous response based on a pattern of unconscious expectations; a story about the anticipated perception of illusionistic art, a problem that, twenty-five centuries after Apelles, was still central in art and art theory — think for instance of René Magritte.6 Patterns of expectation provoke what Jas Elsner, in his discussion on Pygmalion, called the ‘supreme myth of realist viewing’,7 ‘[f ]or in realism, all viewers are invited to become creators.’8 Unconsciously, such patterns build a non-existent reality that influences a visual experience of illusion.9 Zeuxis, deceived by his own patterns of expectation, tried to look beyond the illusion and, in doing so, forgot about its existence. It is this p­ henomenon that I discuss in this essay, for it has substantial implications for the ‘reading’ of early modern Netherlandish art. Patterns of Expectation and Omission As David Brian Huron has stated, ‘[e]xpectation is a constant part of mental life, […]  a biological adaptation with specialized psychological structures and a long evolutionary pedigree’.10 Such patterns are so deeply embedded into our brains that they constantly steer our behaviour and our reactions without us recognising it.11 Strong patterns of expectation are therefore easily disturbed. A textbook example is a traffic light: we are all conditioned to wait at a red light for a certain amount of time, but we expect the light to turn green within a certain timeframe. If a red light remains red for longer than usual, most people will get nervous as their pattern of expectation — a pattern one is generally unaware of — is disrupted. This disruption causes unrest and makes the drivers aware of the fact that they are actually waiting for a red light to turn green.12 To illustrate the importance of this Karel Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck (Haarlem: Paschier Van Wesbusch, 1604), 266r. Koenraad Jonckheere, Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm: Experiments in Decorum 1566–1585 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), passim. 6 See, for example, the discussions of his work in William John Thomas Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 64–76; and Michel Foucault, Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe. Deux Lettres et Quatre Dessins de René Magritte (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1973). 7 Jas Elsner, ‘Visual Mimesis and the Myth of the Real: Ovid’s Pygmalion as Viewer’, Ramus: Critical studies in Greek and Roman Literature, 20 (1991), 154–68 (p. 154). See also Bussels, The Animated Image, pp. 32–36. The ‘Pygmalion effect’ in psychology is the term used to describe self-fulfilling prophecies, a classic example of the impact of unconscious biased patterns of expectation on perception. 8 In fact, Elsner talks about another typical example of the artist deceived by art, namely Pygmalion. Elsner, ‘Visual Mimesis’, p. 161. 9 Such phenomena have been thoroughly confirmed by neuro-cognitive research. See, for example, Arthur P. Shimamura, Experiencing Art in the Brain of the Beholder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), passim; and George Mather, The Psychology of Visual Art: Eye, Brain and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), passim. 10 David Brian Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 3. This book provides a good overview of research on patterns of expectation in various disciplines. 11 David Hothersall, History of Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2004). As psychologists, neurologists, linguists, and others have amply shown in recent decades, human communication is replete with patterns of expectation. Each discipline has developed its own terminology to describe specific aspects of the phenomenon (such as ‘conditioning’, ‘priming’, ‘predictive coding’, etc.), but in this paper I will employ the generic term. 12 Huron, Sweet Anticipation, pp.  1–18. Leonard  B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956) and his ‘law of good continuation’ state that listeners are particularly attentive to disruptions in established patterns. I would like to thank Ethan Matt Kavaler for pointing this out to me. 4 5

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Fig. 1: Edward Frascino, Cartoon. First published in The New Yorker, republished in De Standaard Weekblad, 8 June 2013.

concept for art history, let me use the same ‘methodology’ as Ernst Gombrich and J.  T. Mitchell and refer to a cartoon by Edward Frascino, first published in the New Yorker, that depicts a man entering heaven (Figure 1).13 Great is his surprise when he sees God and notices that He looks nothing like his pictures. The omission of a beard is what creates the strong element of surprise here; a clean-shaven face of God breaches the unconscious pattern of expectation created by seeing an old, white-bearded God time and time again in paintings since the Middle Ages.14 Also published in De Standaard Weekblad, 8 June 2013. To the best of my knowledge, Gombrich was the first to discuss this phenomenon though he never elaborated on it. In an essay on the beholder’s share in Conditions of Illusion, he argued — referring to Leonardo’s Sfumato and to Daniële Barbaro’s comments on, again, Parrhasius — the possibilities of the deliberately blurred image that ‘leads us to understand what one does not see’. Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1956 (London: Phaidon, 1960), pp. 170–203 (esp. p. 185). Surprisingly (or not), Gombrich only mentioned the formal aspects of style and, as far as I know, never explored the possibilities of omission and blurring in iconography. His ideas were inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s own observations (see Da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, ed. by Jean Paul Richter [New York: Dover; London: Constable, 1989], i, p. 127) and by contemporary findings in the Gestalt psychology of the Berlin School in which blurred images were used for experiments (see Hothersall, History of Psychology, pp. 207–48).

13 14

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As the cartoon makes clear, in the slow evolution of the fine arts, patterns of expectation are created over time (sometimes over centuries), and can subsequently be lost and therefore hard to pinpoint in historical perspective.15 It is extremely difficult to reconstruct stylistic or iconographic stereotypes, let alone specific changes or ruptures in longstanding traditions of visual representation. Multiple twentieth-century efforts have shown just how complex the matter is. Aby Warburg’s16 and Henri de Wael’s divergent (iconographic) classification systems, for instance, never succeeded in fully capturing either the cultural and historical diversity or the complexity of the imagery they sought to organize and define.17 Moreover, it is almost impossible to reconstruct the patterns of expectations of a beholder with respect to a certain iconographic or visual theme, since hardly any personal writing on the topic has been preserved. What styles and iconographies would a given individual (or group of individuals) in the past have seen? How often and for how long did the viewer(s) see these images? How did he or she perceive them in contemporary context? Thus, while in (neuro-)psychology, musicology, literary theory, and various other disciplines, many expectation-response theories have been developed, in art history only David Freedberg’s The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response addresses the matter.18 Freedberg, however, focuses on visible disruptions of decorum, while I seek to raise an awareness of absence. Interestingly, though, art history has a specific word it uses to describe certain aspects of the phenomenon of unconscious patterns of expectation and, in particular, the possibility of breaching them — namely, decorum. While ‘decorum’ appears among the 100 Kunsthistorisches Grundbegriffe,19 according to a recent repertory, literature on the topic is scarce and in general limits itself to explaining the origins of the word or, at best, to recounting well-known issues concerning decorum, such as with Caravaggio’s First Saint Matthew or Tintoretto’s Last Supper/Feast in the House of Levi.20 Rigorous, in-depth studies on the concept of decorum and its implications for art history are lacking, notwithstanding the fact that it is one of the most commonly used terms in the field. Most studies still refer to or paraphrase Rensselaer Lee’s discussion of the concept in his classic Ut pictura poesis (1977) or Blunt’s somewhat more recent work on the topic.21

In the so-called ‘performing’ arts such as music, theatre, and film, patterns of expectations have been studied more intensely in recent years. The reason is simple: these arts allow for the creation of patterns of expectation within the timeframe of the ‘performance’. In film, for instance, such patterns are constantly being created and dismantled in order to raise tension and to introduce elements of surprise — created, of course, by disrupting these (unconscious) patterns of expectation. In film, a close analysis of the different steps in building expectations is possible, because a film can be ‘re-viewed’ many times. For this phenomenon in music, see Huron, Sweet Anticipation; and Meyer, Emotion and Meaning. In film theory, see Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960). 16 Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). 17 Henri van de Waal and L. D. Couprie, Iconclass: An Iconographic Classification System, Completed and Edited by L. D. Couprie [and Others] (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1973–). 18 See, for example, Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain From Vienna 1900 to the Present (New York: Random House, 2012); Huron, Sweet Anticipation; and David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 19 Thijs Weststeijn, ‘Decorum’, in Lexikon Kunstwissenschaft. Hundert Grundbegriffe, ed. by Jürgen Müller and Stephan Jordan (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2012), pp. 88–91. 20 Weststijn, ‘Decorum’. 21 Rensselaer  W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W.  W. Norton, 1977); and Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 15

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Credit for the invention of the idea of decorum has traditionally been assigned to Aristotle, who in the Poetics (IV) discusses the importance of using a style appropriate to context in literature and theatre. Horace, Cicero, Virgil, and others also dwelled on this concept, and their writings deeply influenced medieval and early Renaissance thinking on the appropriateness of style and genre.22 In art history, decorum had already been used in a more generic sense in antiquity, for instance when Vitruvius used the word to describe the grotesque decorations in Nero’s palace (the Domus Aurea) which the architect considered to be in-decorous.23 When art theorists in the Quattro- and Cinquecento picked up the term, it remained a rather nonspecific word used to describe the ‘appropriateness’ of a work of art or a human behaviour.24 Thus the problem with the word ‘decorum’ is that, while it has long been in common usage, the concept remains undefined. Still, it is a concept of which humanists and artists of the Middle Ages and Renaissance were well aware and it was a term decidedly not limited to stylistic issues. Sixteenth-century iconoclasm was a rather extreme reaction to imagery and behaviour considered to be in-decorous, though often not for stylistic reasons but for iconographical ones.25 Consequently, in the dozens of pamphlets and tracts on art written in the wake of iconoclasm, the concept of decorum plays a key role.26 Artists, authors, and large groups within society were thus aware of the fact that the public’s patterns of expectation with respect to art did not always match the art itself. Even in the fine arts, however, I would argue that it is possible to recognize and reconstruct some specific aspects of patterns of expectation, for in art they are typically disrupted by the addition of certain in-decorous elements. There are several famous instances in which a work of art provoked arousal, turning it at once into an icon, precisely by breaching patterns of expectation. Perhaps the most famous examples of this in early modern art history would be Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew and Death of the Virgin, which are, not coincidentally, two of the best-documented examples.27 As is commonly known, in both cases the Italian rebel-painter depicted the saint and the Virgin too earthily. The addition of in-decorous elements is, however, not the only way to disrupt unconscious patterns of expectation. Omission is another, powerful means, as Aristotle already knew: in the Rhetoric (2.22.3), he argued that it is not necessary to include all premises (the concept of enthymeme), since ‘the omission of a premise can have the psychological effect of pleasing listeners by appealing to their intelligence’.28 Silence, too, was a well-known principle in Christian rhetorics since the days of Saint Augustine, who valued I will not dwell on it extensively, since Jeroen Jansen and Jan Dietrich Müller most recently published studies of this concept in literature and it is not this specific meaning of decorum that is under discussion here. Jansen, Decorum: Observaties over De Literaire Gepastheid in De Renaissancistische Poëtica (Hilversum: Verloren, 2001); and Müller, Decorum. Konzepte Von Angemessenheit in Der Theorie Der Rhetorik Von Der Sphisten Bis Zur Renaissance, ed. by Joachim Dyck, Walter Jens, and Gert Ueding, Rhetorik-Forshungen: 19 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), which argues that decorum (Angemessenheit) is the key to successful rhetoric. 23 Vitruvius, ‘De architecturi libri decem’, VII.5, in Vitruvius, Handboek Bouwkunde, trans. by Ton Peeters (Amsterdam: Pollak & Van Gennep, 2008), pp. 204–07. 24 See, for example, Decorum in Renaissance Narrative Art: Papers Delivered at the Annual Conference of the Association of Art Historians, ed. by Francis Ames-Lewis and Anka Bednarek (London: Birkbeck College, 1992). 25 Freedberg, The Power of Images. 26 Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives, Gerson Lecture: 2 (Maarssen: Gary Schwartz Sdu Uitgevers, 1985). 27 Weststeijn, ‘Decorum’. 28 George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric & Its Christian & Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, 2nd edn (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 84. 22

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it highly as an important rhetorical device that could lead to greater religious clarity.29 Humanist scholars including Lorenzo Valla revived these ideas during the Renaissance in commentaries on Aristotle.30 Omission, according to these authors, attracts the attention of the beholder, who is invited to fill in the gaps. During the age of iconoclasm in the Low Countries, several artists systematically started to use omission as a means of disrupting strong patterns of expectation and, in doing so, challenged contemporary notions of decorum. Instead of changing details, as Caravaggio famously had, they simply omitted key elements in the iconography. An illustrative example of an iconographic topos that was so manipulated, as Alfred Acres showed, is the Adoration of the Magi.31 From Savonarola’s Florence in the late fifteenth century to the Netherlands in the age of iconoclasm, this subject was one through which the most talented painters methodically experimented with patterns of expectation and with decorum.32 Omission of key elements in this topos proved an important feature of their experimentation. This may come as no surprise, as the story of the magi itself is entirely based on one vague verse in the Gospel of Matthew (2:11). Almost the whole iconography is apocryphal — both Catholics and Protestants (Molanus, Bloccius, and others) agreed on this point33 — although, somewhat paradoxically, the depiction of the scene had become unusually popular, stereotyped, and detailed in the Renaissance. Not unexpectedly, many a humanist and Reformer began to question its iconography. The Adoration of the Magi was first used for important iconographical experiments in Italy. In The Controversy of Renaissance Art, Alexander Nagel discusses Giorgione’s Three Philosophers (Figure 2), a representative example.34 One of the most enigmatic paintings in early modern art history, the painting is believed by many to be a reworking of the Adoration of Magi topos.35 Nagel argues that the omission of iconography-determining elements (in this case a reference to the Nativity) is crucial for the cognitive appreciation of this painting and that this visual ‘silence’ was a deliberate choice by the artist. Such an omission, Nagel believes, created the possibility of ‘not pushing into obscure reaches of Christian iconography, but — in the spirit of Antonello and Leonardo — shifting the ground of the painting’s relation to subject matter, and thereby working into the foundations of Christian art’.36 While he does not dwell upon it, Nagel too recognises the necessity of patterns of expectation for Giorgione’s experiment, asserting that the iconography of the Adoration was indeed a strong topos in early modern art. Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, ‘St  Augustine’s Rhetoric of Silence’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 23. 2  (1962), 175–96. These ideas are, of course, partly inspired by such classical authors as Cicero, who in a discussion on humour and rhetoric in his De oratore libri tres, explains the importance of suggestion and omission as a means of surprising the crowd, of making them laugh, and, consequently, of convincing them of a particular point of view. Cicero argued that to make a cunning joke, it can be more suggestive and thus more effective to leave all options open — that is, not to mention what people expect you to say. 30 See, for example, Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History (Leiden: Brill, 1993). 31 Alfred Acres, Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy (London: Harvey Miller, 2013), esp. pp. 219–54. 32 Jonckheere, Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm, passim. 33 Jonckheere, Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm, passim. 34 Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 60. 35 An overview of the various interpretations of this work is in Karin Zeleny, ‘Giorgiones drei Philosphen: Eine philologische Identifizierung’, in Giorgione Entmythisiert, ed. by Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 191–98. 36 Nagel, The Controversy, p.  66; and Nagel, ‘Structural Indeterminacy in Early-Sixteenth-Century Italian Painting’, in Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art, ed. by Nagel and Lorenzo Pericolo (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 17–42. 29

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Fig. 2: Giorgione, Three philosophers, canvas, 123 × 144 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

As I have argued extensively elsewhere, several painters in Antwerp systematically discussed the same topic, some of them by using similar motifs (or, better, anti-motifs) — for instance the omission of key elements in standardized iconography of the subject. Adriaen Thomasz. Key, for example, commented upon the apocryphal nature of the African magus by simply omitting him (Figure 3).37 In his version of the Adoration, which he painted at a particularly young age, he copied an earlier version by his renowned master Willem Key (Figure  4). Instead of copying the whole panel, however, he dismissed the African magus. As briefly noted above, in the second half of the sixteenth century in the Netherlands, Catholic and Protestant image theologians such as Johannes Molanus and Petrus Bloccius discussed the subject and actually agreed upon the fact that the entire traditional iconography was apocryphal.38 The black magus in particular was problematic, because no such man was mentioned in the Bible. Moreover, the exact number of magi was also a mystery. By omitting this specific figure in an otherwise relatively strict copy of an ambitious painting by his master, the younger artist was commenting on a contemporary socio-religious discourse. In doing so, he made use of a very strong pattern of expectation 37 Jonckheere, ‘Repetition and the Genesis of Meaning: An Introductory Note’, in Art After Iconoclasm, ed. by Jonckheere and Suykerbuyk, pp. 7–19. 38 Cf. n. 33.

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Fig. 3: Adriaen Thomasz. Key, Adoration of the Magi, panel, 65 x 89.5 cm. Present whereabouts unknown.

Fig. 4: Willem Key, Adoration of the Magi, panel, 72 x 108 cm. Present whereabouts unknown.

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Fig. 5: Pieter Aertsen, Adoration of the Magi (two panels of a triptych), oil paint on panel, 1675 x 179 cm (central panel) and 188 x 71 cm (left wing). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

for the iconography of the Adoration that had been developing since the late Middle Ages, in which the black magus was almost always present. This copy-and-omit formula proved successful, for the artist re-used it on several other occasions.39 A more subtle example is Pieter Aertsen’s interpretation of the Adoration (Figure 5). On the central panel of an altarpiece that he probably painted in the late 1550s, he drew attention to the riches of the Church by actually omitting them. While referring to 39 Jonckheere, Adriaen Thomasz Key (ca. 1545 – ca. 1589): Portrait of a Calvinist Painter, ed.  by Hans Vlieghe and Katlijne Van der Stighelen, Pictura Nova: Studies in 16th- and 17th- Century Flemish Painting and Drawing, 14 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), passim.

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Fig. 6: Jan Gossaert, Adoration of the Magi, panel, 177.2 cm × 161.8 cm. London, National Gallery.

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Fig. 7: Michiel Coxcie, Last Supper [central panel of the Triptych of the Holy Sacrament Chapel], 1567, panel, 279 x 250 cm. Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.

traditional iconography in which a golden chalice filled with gold coins was nearly always central (Figure 6), the focal point of Aersten’s interpretation is the empty hand.40 Indeed, in the plethora of Adoration paintings produced in Antwerp in the first half of the sixteenth century, the oldest magus is nearly always kneeling as he offers gold to the Christ child. This was an extremely strong topos, as nearly one out of three Antwerp paintings in the early sixteenth century was an Adoration.41 The omission of this iconographical element in an age of omnipresent debate on the riches of the Church was, no doubt, meaningful. Jonckheere, Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm, pp. 192–96. Dan Ewing, ‘Magi and Merchants: The Force Behind the Antwerp Mannerists’ Adoration Pictures’, Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, (2004–05), 275–99.

40 41

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A second kind of iconographical omission is that of the empty niche. After Iconoclasm, empty niches in painting became a means of commenting on the nature of art — in particular sculpture. Michiel Coxcie (Figure 7), for example, commented on pagan idolatry by combining empty niches with the second commandment in 1567, one year after Iconoclasm, when empty niches were open wounds of social unrest.42 Coxcie no doubt got the idea from the Tomasso Laureti fresco in the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican, in which a destroyed pagan sculpture lies in front of empty niches (Figure 8). On the central panel of a Holy Sacrament triptych, Coxcie depicted two empty niches under which, in Hebrew, he wrote the famous verses from the decalogue (Exodus 20:1–17: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’ and ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image’).43 Through the omission of pagan images, Coxcie thus showed his viewers that his painting was not an idolatrous object. Maarten de Vos used the same idea in his Saint Luke Painting the Virgin (Figure 9). He emptied the niches, referring to his own invention for the joyous entry into Antwerp of Ernst of Austria in 1594 (Figure 10).44 The painting’s message can be read as Saint Luke depicting a rightful image; the pagan idols are gone.45 These examples (discussed briefly here since I have addressed them extensively on other occasions) are the tip of an iceberg. If one looks at the iconography of late sixteenthcentury painting with the concepts of patterns of expectation and decorum in mind, one finds that standard iconographies, such as that employed in the Adoration, are often breached by the omission of key elements. The crux of this methodological issue is, of course, the reconstruction of these patterns. Baxandall, in his work, called it the difference between the participant’s and the observer’s understanding, which resulted in different kinds of decorum and in different possible interpretations (that is, the hermeneutic problem).46 However, the participant’s understanding can, to some degree, be reconstructed, and it is this reconstruction that allows for a more nuanced observer’s interpretation: one that makes the implicit both tangible and cognitive. I  believe that this reconstruction of the participant’s understanding has focussed too much (even solely) on the represented, and in doing so has missed the opportunity to explore the possibilities of omission as a ‘symbolic form’, to paraphrase Panofsky.47 The thought-provoking problem for art history — and especially iconology — is that this minor disruption of an unconscious visual pattern of expectations forces the primed viewer not to contemplate the picture as a whole, but to focus on what is omitted. In other words: the absent automatically becomes the focal point of the image, at least for those who recognise the omission. The examples of Antwerp art might seem rather harmless to us, but showing a photograph of the New York skyline without the Twin Towers to a New Yorker the day after 9/11 can hardly be dismissed as meaningless. Showing the same picture to a New Yorker in, say, 50 years would probably not trigger such a strong emotional Jonckheere, ‘Images of Stone’. I thank Larry Silver and his son for their assistance with the Hebrew here. Cf. Ann Diels, ‘Van opdracht tot veiling. Kunstaanbestedingen naar aanleiding van de Blijde Intrede van aartshertog Ernest van Oostenrijk te Antwerpen in 1594’, De zeventiende eeuw, 19.1 (2003), 25–54. 45 Jonckheere, ‘Images of Stone’. 46 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in 15th-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p.  29. This claim can hardly be challenged, and it paved the way for Bal’s and Bryson’s linguistic turn, in which the ambition to painstakingly reconstruct the participant’s understanding was largely dismissed. 47 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as a Symbolic Form, ed. and trans. by Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1997). Just like perspective, according to Panofsky, omission can be a symbolic form. 42 43 44

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Fig. 8: Tomasso Lauretti, Triumph of Christianity, fresco. Rome, Vatican. Sala di Constantino.

Fig. 9: Maarten de Vos, Saint Luke painting the Virgin (central panel of the Saint Luke ­Altarpiece), 1602, panel, 270 × 217 cm. Antwerp, Royal Museum of Fine Art.

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Fig. 10: Joan Bochius after Maarten de Vos, Descriptio Publicae Gratulationis … in Aduentu Sereniss. Principis Ernesti Archiducis Austriae. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

or cognitive response, however. Similarly, in an age of iconoclasm, when people were put to death because of their iconoclastic acts, the effects of iconographic features such as empty niches should not be minimized. It is quite hard to prove the public’s awareness of omissions, but sporadically a rare anecdote does prove the point. As Anne-Laure Van Bruaene noted in her study of the Duke of Anjou’s joyous entry into Ghent, one observer remarked that it was a serious mistake on the part of the organizers that there was no single burning torch on the stage

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where Anjou took his oath.48 Spectators, no doubt, could have expectations and be aware of deliberate omissions. A Quaestio disputata? Having established the fact that a key to understanding early modern art sometimes lies in the expected absent,49 it is now worth considering the consequences of this observation. I will use the example of Pieter Bruegel the Elder to delve further into the repercussions. In the introductory chapter of his important study, Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter (2006), Walter Gibson phrased some of the arguments that had allowed many an art historian to put forward wild iconological analyses of Bruegel’s iconographies.50 Gibson referred, for instance, to the misreading of Abraham Ortelius’s famous epitaph in which he (Ortelius) stated that his friend (Bruegel) ‘painted many things that cannot be painted’. This sentence, a paraphrase of Timanthes’ story in Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, opened the quest for ‘hidden meaning’ in Bruegel’s oeuvre — a quest that was based, according to Gibson, on an old misunderstanding of Timanthes.51 In Pliny’s story of Timanthes, the ‘meaning’ was not literally hidden. Instead, it was known to everyone, since the visual narrative was based on a familiar story. Timanthes, however, did not paint the narrative as his viewers expected. Indeed, when commissioned to paint the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Pliny recounts, Timanthes depicted the grief of all the bystanders most marvellously. But, unable to accurately represent the immense sorrow of Iphigenia’s father, the artist covered the man’s face with a veil.52 In doing so, Timanthes revealed Agamemnon’s overwhelming emotions by actually concealing them, cleverly making use of the effect of omission to attract the beholder’s compassion. The artist thus invited his audience to reflect upon the unanswerable question and to imagine the grief of Agamemnon themselves. Just like Parrhasius, Timanthes played with the patterns of expectation of the beholder. As I’ve argued both above and elsewhere, many a painter in the second half of the sixteenth century made use of the possibilities of omission.53 While such painters did not use this technique to extract emotional empathy, as had Pliny’s Timanthes, they did use the patterns of expectation of conditioned or primed viewers to subtly focus their emotional and cognitive attention.54 Through the omission of key elements from standardized iconographic formats, they appealed to the viewer’s unconscious expectations and trapped their immediate and enduring attention. To fully explain the consequences of this phenomenon, it is worthwhile to refer briefly to Panofsky’s famous ‘stroller’ anecdote, through which Anne-Laure van Bruaene, ‘Spectacle and Spin for a Spurned Prince: Civic Strategies in the Entry Ceremonies of the Duke of Anjou in Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent (1582)’, Journal of Early Modern History, 11 (2007) 263–84 (esp. pp. 266– 67). ‘maer veel lieden die waren verwondert dat op de stellinghe daermen dien eedt so solemenneerlijcken dede datter niet also vele als een torsse ofte flambeau en branden dwelc een groote faute was van die tregement hadden’ 49 This has also been observed with respect to medieval art: Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), passim. 50 Walter S. Gibson, Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 1–13. 51 Jan Muylle, ‘Pieter Bruegel en Abraham Ortelius: bijdrage tot de literaire receptie van Pieter Bruegels werk’, in Archivum Artis Lovaniense: Bijdragen Tot De Geschiedenis Van De Kunst Der Nederlanden Opgedragen Aan Prof. Em. J. K. Steppe, ed. by Maurits Smeyers (Leuven: Peeters, 1981), pp. 319–37. 52 Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, 35. 73. On the story, see McHam, Pliny, pp. 43–44. Timanthes’ trick of concealing the un-representable is always linked to the depiction of emotions but has wider implications. 53 Jonckheere, Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm, pp. 263–69. 54 ‘Priming’ is a term used in psychology to describe an implicit memory effect caused by a first stimulus and in response to a second stimulus. 48

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Fig. 11: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Christ and the woman taken in adultery, panel, 24.1 × 34.4 cm. London, The Courtauld Institute of Art. Seilern Collection.

he explained his foundational methodology.55 If the stroller in Panofsky’s story had not lifted his hat, the absence of the greeting would have been considered impolite. Indeed, the conventions of appropriate behaviour (decorum) would have been broken not by an actual gesture but by the lack of any such. If decorum had been breached by another, explicit, gesture the meaning would have been more easily ascertained, since the other gesture would have a clear semantic connotation.56 The mere absence of a greeting, however, would trigger a whole other set of responses, primarily questions: Why did he not greet me? Did he not see me? Is he angry with me? Comparably, I would argue, the omission of the black magus or of the gold in the Adoration scenes by Key and Aertsen, or the omission of the niche sculptures in Coxcie’s and De Vos’s altarpieces, must have provoked questions for a contemPanofsky explained his methodology on several occasions; I refer to the introduction in Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford: Westview Press, 1939; repr. 1972), pp. 3–31. Imagine, Panofsky writes, an acquaintance walking in the streets. He lifts his hat as you approach him. The factual observation of a man holding his hat is the pre-iconographical description, he argues. It is the recognition of a formal object consisting of line and colour. However, let us recognise the man as a friend, Panofsky continues, speaking here of a factual meaning, of an unconscious response provoked by immanent patterns of expectation. Then, the act will be read as a greeting. Here, Panofsky argues, the expressional meaning comes in. ‘It differs from the factual one in that is apprehended, not by simple identification but by empathy’. In other words, this ‘expressional’ recognition requires sensitivity. Moreover, we will read the gesture as a greeting only if we are members in a culture in which we are trained or ‘conditioned’ to read the lifting of the hat as a polite gesture, which is a gestural remnant of medieval chivalry. 56 On the semantics of gesture, see, for instance, André Chastel, ‘Gesture in Painting: Problems in Semiology’, Renaissance and Reformation, 10. 1  (1986) 1–22; David  F. Armstrong, William  C. Stokoe, and Sherman  E. Wilcox, Gesture and the Nature of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. by Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). 55

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Fig. 12: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Village kermis, c. 1567, oil paint on panel, 114 × 164 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

porary audience: What is missing? Why this absence? What does it mean? By disrupting patterns of expectation through the omission of cognitively and emotionally expected elements, these images invite the beholder to fill in the missing links and to reflect upon them. Bruegel, who was equated with Timanthes by Ortelius, seems to have been posing similar ‘questions’ to his audience. In his grisailles of the Adulterous Woman (Figure 11), for instance, he played with patterns of expectation and omission.57 As I have explored elsewhere, Bruegel appealed to a contemporary and all-pervasive discourse on the materiality of art (mere stone) and on the adulterous nature of iconolatry while referring to the grisaille trompe-l’oeil of sculptures on the outer wings of the altarpieces. Indeed, idolatry and adultery were systematically linked throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance.58 However, one of the most interesting aspects of this little panel is Bruegel’s omission of clues. Jesus writes his famous words at the feet of the adulterous woman, but at the word ‘Werpen’ (Dutch for ‘throwing’), he refrains. Only the ‘W’ is visible. Crucially, ‘(af )Werpen’ was a word used for iconoclasm in the Low Countries.59 Working for an audience primed by discussions on the materiality of art, iconolatry, and adultery, Bruegel could trigger responses to this discussion by the absence of a weighted, multivalent word.60 By posing Jonckheere, Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm, pp. 199–209. See also Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 13–20. 58 Camille, The Gothic Idol, passim. 59 As, for example, in the title of Philips van Marnix van Saint Aldegonde, Van De Beelden Afgheworpen in De Nederlanden in Augusto 1566, ed. by J. J. Van Toorenenbergen Godsdienstige En Kerkelijke Geschriften (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1871.) 60 Abraham Ortelius, referring to Apelles and Timanthes, lauded Bruegel for his restrained iconographic style. For a translation of Ortelius’s verses, see Mark  A. Meadow, ‘Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary: Aemulatio and the Space of Vernacular Style’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 47 (1996), 181–205 (pp. 192–96). 57

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a (visual) question in his Adulterous Woman that was comparable to the effect created by Timanthes in his depiction of Iphigenia Bruegel employed iconography as an invitation to the beholder to fill in a gap and thereby to reflect upon the desirability of iconoclasm.61 Another, somewhat more complex example of Bruegel’s construction of a similar visual question is his Peasant Kermis in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (Figure 12). In recent years, many scholars have scrutinized this painting. Ethan Matt Kavaler and Todd Richardson, in particular, have contributed significantly to our understanding of its style and iconography.62 Moreover, they have ably demonstrated how paintings such as this one might have functioned as conversation pieces in a sixteenth-century civic context — that is, not purely as an exemplum contrarium,63 but as an open narrative full of possible associations, ranging from humanist understandings of Roman Bacchanalia and the vernacular to religious debates and civic morality. Kavaler and Richardson reconstructed aspects of a complex societal debate affiliated with the painting’s imagery — that is, the primed nature of the beholders or, in Baxandall’s terms, the period eye. However, as Kavaler writes: ‘Bruegel’s Peasant Kermis is disturbingly ambiguous, resisting clear allegiance to any tradition. It does not disappear, so to speak, behind a confirmation of expectations but rather challenges the viewer to find a meaningful way of addressing the picture’.64 In addition to Kavaler’s sharp observation and as a means of further expounding upon the idea of omission and the creation of a visual question-syntax, I would argue that Bruegel was aware of and intentionally played upon the patterns of expectation of his viewers, blurring the iconography of the painting through omission. For this reason, it is important to understand how the Vienna panel differs from Bruegel’s own, earlier depictions. Indeed, Pieter Bruegel the Elder represented Kermises on several occasions, either in drawing, in print, or on panel. In two prints, Saint George Kermis (c.  1559) and Kermis at Hoboken (1559), he depicted the folklore he is renowned for.65 We see laughing, singing, drinking, and dancing peasants enjoying themselves on a holiday. In both of these prints, however, the procession — the main event on such feast days, though by no means requiring such representation — is depicted as an essential part of the festivities. As such, the composition and iconography of the prints are similar to, for instance, Pieter Aertsen’s Saint Antony’s Procession (Figure 13), in which the carrying of the devotional sculpture is shown nearly at the centre of the composition. Right around the time when Bruegel painted his panel, an important socio-religious debate on Saints’ days and on Kermises was coming to a head in the Low Countries. Exceptionally (yet again), both Catholics and Protestants agreed that these religious holidays had become problematic. Two quotations — the first taken from the first Dutch edition of the decrees of the Council of Trent (1565) and the second by the reformed theologian Petrus Bloccius (1567) — make that agreement abundantly clear.66 As Sullivan argues, proverbs (as studied by Erasmus, among others, and as depicted by Bruegel) were also considered to have a ‘hidden meaning’. Margret Sullivan, ‘Bruegel’s Proverbs: Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance’, The Art Bulletin, 73.3 (1991), 431–66 (p. 438). 62 Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel, pp. 184–211; and Todd M. Richardson, Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Art Discourse in the SixteenthCentury Netherlands (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 123–48. 63 Korine Hazelzet, Verkeerde Werelden: Exempla Contraria in De Nederlandse Beeldende Kunst (Leiden: Primavera, 2007), pp. 103–12. 64 Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel, pp. 184–211; and Richardson, Pieter Bruegel, p. 196. 65 Johannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Bruegel, Saint-George’s Kermis, 1559, etching and engraving, 332  ×  523 mm, four states known; and Frans Hogenberg after Pieter Bruegel, Kermis at Hoboken, c.  1559, etching and engraving, 298 × 408 mm, four states known. 66 See also Jonckheere, Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm, p. 66. 61

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Fig. 13: Pieter Aertsen, Return to the Saint Anthony procession, c. 1550, oil paint on panel, 110 × 170 cm. Brussels, Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België.

Dat oock de menschen het vieren vanden heylighen, oft pelgrimagie gaen, ende besoeken de heylighe Reliquien, niet en misbruycken tot overdaet en[de] dronckenschap, al oft die H. daghen souden moeten overbrocht werde[n] met met overdaet en[de] broot dronckenschap ter eere[n] va[n]den Heylighe. Ten lesten zo zullen in dese sake[n] de Bisschoppen zo nerstelijc en[de] scherpelijck toesien datter niet onghereghelt, verkeert oft beroerlijck en gheschiede, noch niet ongoddelijcx oft oneerlijcx ghesien en werde.67 That also the people celebrate the saints, or go on pilgrimage and visit the holy relics, and not abuse them with excess and drunkenness, as if the holy days should be spent in excess and drunkenness in honour of the saint. Finally, the bishops will diligently and strictly supervise an orderly, correct, and acceptable course, without ungodliness or treachery. De lxxxiiii ketterye is, dat de ketters veel feest-dagen Blasij, Machuyt, Waldruyt, Quirini, Willebrordt, Leopoldi ende diergelycke onbekende afgoden ghebieden te houden, met costelicke cleederen ghullighe maeltijden, ende onbehoorlicke afgoderye, alsoo datmen heur feest-daghen niet beters mach vernemen, dan aen heur herberghen, welcke dan vol dronckaers zyn: ende datse dan proncken ende sitten leech voor de doore verhaelen achter-clap ende ander lieden ghebreken. Christus ende de Apostels hebben gheen feest-daghen.68 Ordonnancien ende decreten, vanden heylighen Concilie generael ghehouden tot Trenten (Antwerp: Willem Silvius, 1565), pp. 244–45. 68 Petrus Bloccius, Meer Dan Tvvee Hondert Ketteryen, Blasphemien En Nieuwe Leeringen, Vvelck Vvt De Misse Zyn Ghecomen / Eerst Van Petro Bloccio School-Meester Te Leyden in Latyn Ghemaeckt, Daer Nae in Duytsch Voor Slechte Menschen Ouerghesett […] (Wesel: Augustijn van Hasselt, 1567), pp. 72–73. 67

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The Lxxxiiii heresy is that the heretics dictate celebrating many holy-days for Blasius, Machuyt, Waltrudis, Quirinus, Willebrordus, Leopold, and other such unfamiliar idols, with costly clothes, lavish meals, and indecent idolatry, so that on these holy days they are found at their inns (which are then packed with drunks), where they show off and lay wasted, listening to grubby stories and gossip about other people’s shortcomings. Christ and his apostles had no holy days.

Comments on Kermises such as these were common in the 1560s, when Bruegel made his painting, and people often heard and discussed sermons on these issues.69 Psychologically speaking, viewers of Bruegel’s paintings would have been primed with the idea that such excesses on a holy day were highly undesirable. In the Vienna Peasant Kermis, Bruegel omits the procession, thereby dismissing the strongest religious marker of the painting’s traditional iconography and allowing the beholder to read the visual narrative according to his or her own attentiveness. If a procession or another clear indicator had been included, the multiple questions and possible answers resulting from this version would have been reduced to a narrower set of interpretations. However, while referring to a longstanding iconographical tradition (that included his own prints),70 Bruegel did not restrict his iconography to a clear-cut stance. Instead, he opened it up and phrased a quaestio disputata. Paintings such as the Adulteress Woman and the Peasant Kermis already have strong suggestive power and, due to the omission of an iconography-determining element, become an even more explicit invitation for reflection. In line with Ortelius’s epitaph, one could call this phenomenon a ‘Timanthes effect’: the effect created by a painter who ensures that ‘altijts eenighe heymelijcke verstanden oft bediedtselen in verborghen laghen, boven het ghene dat het punct was, dat hy in zijn Historie hadde uytghebeeldet’.71 Or, to translate freely, ‘there were always stealthily insights and explations to be found next to the point he had made in the actual narrative’. A Culture of Question? While the idea of reading the aforementioned panels as a quaestio might seem farfetched, it can be argued that this is an obvious consequence of Bruegel’s and other painters’ humanist backgrounds and their interests in rhetorics. Morever, such a hypothesis fits perfectly well into the early modern intellectual habitus. In educational systems, in literature, in humanism, in religion, in dialectics, and indeed in rhetorics, the quaestio played a seminal role. Since the late Middle Ages, students in scholastics, for instance, learned to formulate questions.72 These quaestiones disputatae were considered the basis of argumentation and were subdivided into separate articula following which dialectical arguments and In recent years, historians have studied extensively the dissemination of ideas during the first decades of the Revolt. Particularly interesting in this context are Van Bruaene, Om beters wille. Rederijkerskamers en de stedelijke cultuur in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (1400–1650) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008); and Peter  J. Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 70 Allison G. Stewart, Before Bruegel: Sebald Beham and the Origins of Peasant Festival Imagery (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008). 71 Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck (Haarlem: Paschier Van Wesbusch, 1604), 70r http://gtb.inl.nl ‘Verborghen’ in Van Mander’s phrase is not simply to be translated with ‘hidden’. In this case, it probably means ‘not immediately discernable’. 72 On quaestiones disputatae, see for instance Martin Grabmann, Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode, ii, Die scholastische Methode im 12. und beginnenden 13. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1957), p. 221; and Brian Lawn, The Rise and Decline of the Scholastic ‘Quaestio Disputata’: With Special Emphasis on Its Use in the Teaching of Medicine and Science (Leiden: Brill, 1993). 69

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counter-arguments were formulated. The Questio de Quodlibet (a more liberal and public disputation), too, was based on this scheme. As Saint Augustine wrote in his treatise on education, De catechizandis rudibus, real scholars are the ones who pose important questions.73 In other words, intellectuals in medieval and early modern Europe were trained to think based on the premises of questions. The centrality of the question was thus an ancient tradition held by European intellectuals, and even early scholars like Saint Augustine built on rhetorical and dialectical theories developed during antiquity. Indeed, since the days of Socrates and the Sophists, the question has played a crucial role in Western intellectual culture: it was believed to be the point of departure for all philosophical knowledge. Questions were considered to be essential in clearly defining the actual problem (Stasis theory) and in finding the solution (dialectics). Stasis theory, which was first suggested in the writings of Plato and Aristotle and was fully developed by Hermagoras, was highly influential until well into the sixteenth century. Cicero and Quintilianus used and developed it further, as did early Christian scholars such as Origin and Augustine, and, later on, Boethius.74 Chapters five and six in the third book of Quintillianus’s treatise on rhetoric for instance, are completely dedicated to stasis. In the Renaissance, the theory was revived by such influential humanists as George Trebizond and Rudolphus Agricola, a Dutch humanist who made a career in Italy.75 The second book of his influential De inventione dialectica is completely dedicated to the nature and appropriate division of questions.76 In essence, stasis and other Renaissance theories of dialectic are methodological schemes on how to get the initial question right. The method, unsurprisingly, is to pose accurate questions. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the full implications of this long-standing tradition, it is vital to stress the fact that the culture of the question was translated into popular vernacular texts in the sixteenth century and even echoes in the writings of the most fervent adversaries of scholasticism, namely Protestant theologians. Their most successful publications — and thus those with the biggest social impacts — such as Luther’s Small Catechism, the Genevan Catechism, and the Heidelberg Catechismus, were all phrased in a strict question-answer scheme.77 This may come as no surprise, since even in humanist discourse (the very discourse that challenged scholasticism)78 the question played a seminal role.79 Indeed, inspired by the so-called Socratic or elenctic method (as described in Plato’s Dialogues), which was influential in both neo-Platonic and scholastic traditions, Aurelius Augustinus, Goed Onderwijs. Christendom voor Beginners (De Catechizandis Rudibus), ed. and trans. by Vincent Hunink and Hans Van Reisen (Budel: Damon, 2009), p.  85: ‘(13) Sunt item quidam de scholis usitatissimis grammaticorum oratorumque uenietes, quos neque inter idiotas numerare audeas neque inter illos doctissimos, quorum mens magnarum rerum est exercitata quaestionibus’. 74 Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric, pp. 99, 115, 122, 159. 75 Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric, pp.  231–45. Mack, A  History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 56–75. 76 Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, pp. 56–59. 77 Willem J. Can Asselt, Inleiding in de Gereformeerde Scholastiek: Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011). Note that the Roman Catechism, published after the Council of Trent, dismissed the questions and phrased the doctrine in a purely affirmative manner. 78 See, for example, Charles  G. Nauert, ‘Humanism as Method: Roots of Conflict with the Scholastics’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 29.2 (1998), 427–38. 79 Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986), passim; Mack, ‘Humanist Rhetoric and Dialectic’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed.  by Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.  82–99 (pp. 83–84). 73

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the question itself and the dialectics of question-and-answer were essential. Socrates would, famously, continue interrogating people until their arguments fell apart and descended into aporeia (ἀπορεία), defined in ancient Greek philosophy as a state of cognitive loss.80 Socrates and Plato both found it crucial to first be in intellectual despair before taking a fresh, rational, philosophical start.81 Recently, aporeia was linked to the arts by Nagel and Pericolo, who convincingly argue that some early modern works of art intentionally block the path of cognition in order to create aporeia. Nagel uses Giorgione’s Three Philosophers as a clear-cut example.82 Rhetoricians also had a ‘culture of the question’. The chambers of rhetoric in the Low Countries were places of societal discourse, and functioned as catalysts of ideas.83 In order to facilitate these transfers, question formulas were used systematically, as Marijke Spies has argued.84 For instance, the rhetoricians’ games in Brabant — called Het landjuweel — were writing contests in which a question was the central guiding principle. Zinnespelen, the most popular writings of the rhetoricians, were based on a similar format, for these plays were completely structured around a ‘questye’.85 Just like scholastics and humanists, rhetoricians were thus trained to argue on the premise of a quaestio disputata.86 What’s more: apart from their awareness of questions, rhetoricians were attuned to the possibilities of omission as well. In their plays, for instance, they regularly introduced characters that never appeared on stage. The public would thus constantly be expecting them during the play, but would never actually see them appear. Surprisingly, in the many studies on, for instance, the work of Bruegel, Aertsen, and others, and the different cultures of discourse in the sixteenth century that systematically link their work to rhetoricians and humanists by Richardson, Sullivan, and Meadow, among others, the idea that a work of art might have been conceived as a quaestio has not been put forward.87 Moreover, the possibility of question syntax for visual narrative in early modern art has, to the best of my knowledge, largely been neglected, while the problem that I have discussed in this paper is already immanent in, for instance, P ­ anofsky’s Gary Alan Scott, Does Socrates Have a Method?: Rethinking the Elenchus in Plato’s Dialogues (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2004). 81 In the Renaissance, Plato (and his stories on Socrates) were ‘re-discovered’ and translated, and had a huge impact on humanist discourse. Many of the most famous Renaissance books were dialogues similar to Plato’s, in which questions were a crucial part of the imagined conversations. Erasmus’s Colloquies are arguably the most famous example. See, for instance, Plato’s Myths, ed.  by Catalin Partenie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). In the Netherlands, the most influential later humanists (such as Dirck Volkertzoon Coornhert, a Haarlem-based author-engraver and friend to many painters in the sixteenth-century Low Countries) used this genre too, phrasing complex theoretical, philosophical, and theological ideas in the form of a dialogue. On Coornhert, see H.  Bonger, Leven en werk van Dirck Volkertzoon Coornhert (Amsterdam, 1987; repr.). The number of questions in such dialogues are innumerable. See, for example, Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert, Synode over Gewetensvrijheid: Een Nauwgezet Onderzoek in De Vergadering Gehouden in Het Jaar 1582 Te Vrijburgh, ed. and trans. by J. Gruppelaar, J. C. Bedaux, and G. Verwey, Bibliotheca Dissidentium Neerlandicorum (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008). 82 Nagel and Pericolo, Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 83 Van Bruaene, Om beters wille. 84 Marijke Spies, ‘“Op de questye […]”: Over de structuur van 16e-eeuwse zinnespelen’, De nieuwe taalgids, 83 (1990), 139–50; Spies, Rhetoric, Rhetoricians and Poets: Studies in Renaissance Poetry and Poetics (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), pp. 15–17. 85 Spies, ‘“Op de questye […]”’. 86 Spies, Rhetoric, Rhetoricians and Poets, pp. 15–17. 87 See, for example, Sullivan, Bruegel’s Peasants: Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Meadow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs and the Practice of Rhetoric, Studies in Netherlandish Art and Cultural History: 4 (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2002); and Richardson, Pieter. 80

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pioneering anecdote.88 Panofsky correctly supposes a basic level of ‘empathy’ and a common familiarity with specific cultural conventions in every human being, but he refrains from following through to the full consequences of this observation. While — in the tradition of Wölfflin and Riegl89 — Panofsky starts with the formal observation to subsequently argue, in opposition to his predecessors, that there is more to art than formality, he eventually restricts himself to the interaction of the beholder’s mind and the formal properties of the ‘object’ in order to construct his iconographical and iconological layers of interpretation. His scheme, in other words, is built on the observable, while if one agrees with the fact that people in a certain socio-historical context are preconditioned to read the gesture of a man as a greeting, one also has to accept that the man could have walked by without a greeting and that this would have been regarded as impolite and discourteous. The non-appearance of the gesture is the ‘formal’ (or anti-formal?) foundation on which to build in this case. It is the disruption of the patterns of expectation that generates ‘factual meaning’ here. Thus, while meaning in art has, since Panofsky, been one of the most thoroughly discussed topics in art history, and many theoretical and methodological models have been proposed as means of interpreting visual narrative and its relation to the beholder’s perception (now and in the past), its most fundamental paradigm, namely ‘La Tyrannie du visible’ — a phrase used by Didi-Huberman to frame the Renaissance — has not thoroughly been addressed.90 Art history has focused too much on the observable, I would argue. The undepicted and the omitted play a key role in the genesis of meaning, for absence can disrupt patterns of cognitive and emotional expectations and, as such, decorum. By playing with patterns of expectations and the perception of the imperceptible, and by deliberately blurring iconography through omission, early modern artists and their patrons paved the way for works of art as quaestiones disputatae. For if one recognises the fact that strong patterns of expectation do exist at all times, in all cultures (and recent research in various disciplines makes this hard to ignore), and that these patterns are vital stepping stones in the genesis of meaning, one also has to accept that one can disrupt these patterns by deliberately omitting the cognitively- or emotionally-expected.91 In other words, if a strong pattern of expectation regarding the depiction of a certain topos exists, it is possible to successfully pose a question to the beholder by not depicting key-elements. ‘Why’, Zeuxis must have asked himself, ‘did I expect to find the image behind the curtain?’

The closest to this idea is Nagel, cf. n. 82. Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, Art History: A  Critical Introduction to Its Methods (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 65–95. 90 Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image: Question posée aux fins d’une Histoire de l’art. Collection ‘Critique’ (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990), p.  64. Didi-Huberman, moreover, famously discussed the importance of the ‘absent’ in his discussion of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation. See Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance et Figuration (Paris: Flammarion, 1990). 91 A fashionable theory in neuropsychology today, for instance, is predictive coding. This theory states that the brain responds more intensely to whatever differs from the expected. See Rajesh P. N. Rao and Dana H. Ballard, ‘Predictive Coding in the Visual Cortex: A  Functional Interpretation of Some Extra-Classical Receptive-Field Effects’, Nature Neuroscience, 2 (1999), 79–87. 88 89

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Beyond the Low Countries

A Missing Link? Sixteenth-Century Protestant Basilicas by Netherlandish Architects outside the Low Countries Konrad Ottenheym Utrecht University

Introduction The historiography of Dutch Protestant churches has long been restricted to buildings erected in the Northern Low Countries, for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, broadening that horizon may give new insight into some aspects of this history — aspects that, for a long time, have been overlooked. Research during the last decade on (temporary) sixteenth-century Protestant prayer halls in the Southern Low Countries, for instance, has shown that the preference for centralized plans, so common in seventeenth-century Holland, may have had its initial start in the South.1 This paper will focus on another aspect of early Netherlandish Protestant church architecture: the first longitudinal churches constructed by building masters from the Low Countries in Scandinavia and Latvia. The church buildings in these regions may be regarded as a kind of laboratory of new architectural forms and solutions for the new religion, decades before they were needed in Holland. Longitudinal and Centralized Protestant Churches in Holland The formal transition to the new, Protestant religion in the Northern Low Countries took place in the 1570s, rather late compared with other parts of Europe.2 The change had an immediate impact on urban life. Monasteries were abandoned and transformed into orphanages, dwellings for the elderly, and schools, or were demolished and replaced by new urban quarters. The major city churches remained functional, now serving the new

Joris Snaet, Reformatie versus contrareformatie. De religieuze architectuur in de Noordelijke en Zuidelijke Nederlanden gedurende de 16de en 17de eeuw (unpublished doctoral thesis, Leuven University, 2007). See also n. 6. 2 Murk Daniël Ozinga, De protestantsche Kerkenbouw in Nederland van Hervorming tot Franschen tijd (Amsterdam: Paris, 1929); C. A. van Swigchem, T. Brouwer, and W. van Os, Een Huis voor het Woord. Het protestantse kerkinterieur in Nederland tot 1900 (The Hague: Staatsuitgeverij, 1984); Per Gustav Hamberg, Temples for Protestants: Studies in the Architectural Milieu of the Early Reformed Church and of the Lutheran Church (Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2002); Andrew Spicer, Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); and Lutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Spicer (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 1

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 355-373. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114016

Konrad Ottenheym

religion. A  new kind of church interior was created that was organized around the pulpit and abandoned all altars and images of saints.3 Since all cities had at least one or two former Catholic parish churches that could be adapted to the new religion, the Reformation of the 1570s did not immediately force the creation of a new building type especially designed for Calvinist worship. The first examples of these new buildings, therefore, are to be found in new garrison cities along the Republic’s borders and in the new urban quarters of enlarged cities. In current Dutch art history, the story of Protestant church architecture starts with the octagonal church of Willemstad (North Brabant), which was begun in 1595.4 This, indeed, is the first example of a building especially erected for the Calvinist religion on the territory of the Dutch Republic. It was Prince Maurits of Nassau, himself, who insisted that the church had to be erected on an octagonal ground plan,5 and it is generally regarded as the starting point for a whole range of centralized church buildings that are considered to form the dominant tradition in Dutch Protestant church architecture. Nevertheless, the first new Protestant churches of the Low Countries were built in 1566 in Ghent and Antwerp during a brief experiment in religious toleration. By the following year, when Catholicism was fully restored, all of them had already been demolished. The temporary Protestant church in Ghent is best known due to a detailed description: it was erected mainly in wood and brick on an octagonal, elliptical ground plan.6 The Dutch tradition of centralized Protestant churches that started in Willemstad, therefore, may have had its roots in these briefly existing examples from the Southern Low Countries of twenty years earlier. In the seventeenth century, the octagonal model of Willemstad was repeated in another garrison city at the southern border of the Republic, at IJzendijke (1611–14),7 and by prestigious churches such as the Marekerk of Leiden by Arent van ‘s-Gravesande (1639–49) and the Oostkerk in Middelburg (1646–62).8 Other kinds of centralized spaces also came into use during this period. In 1620–22, the Noorderkerk in Amsterdam by Hendrick in Keyser was built on a Greek cross plan combined with an octagonal plan, a design that was more or less copied in 1629–39 by the Grote Kerk of Maassluis and in 1660–65 by the Noorderkerk of Groningen.9 In 1639, Jacob van Campen designed the church of Renswoude, which was based on a combination Greek cross plan, square crossing, and Justin  E.  A. Kroesen, ‘Accommodating Calvinism: The Appropriation of Medieval Church Interiors for Protestant Worship in the Netherlands after the Reformation’, in Protestantischer Kirchenbau der Frühen Neuzeit in Europa. Grundlagen und neue Forschungskonzepte, Protestant Church Architecture in Early Modern Europe: Fundamentals and New Research Approaches, ed. by Jan Harasimowicz (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2015), pp. 81–98. 4 G. C. A. Juten, ‘De koepelkerk van Willemstad’, Taxandria, 29 (1922), 11–25; Ozinga, De protestantsche, pp. 12–19; and Gabri van Tussenbroek, The Architectural Network of the Van Neurenberg Family in the Low Countries (1480–1640), Architectura Moderna: 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), pp. 123–32. 5 Annemie De Vos, ‘Propaganda voor staat en huis’, in Maurits, Prins van Oranje, ed. by Kees Zandvliet (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum; Zwolle: Waanders, 2000), pp. 123–36 (pp. 130–32). 6 Snaet, ‘For the Greater Glory of God: Religious Architecture in the Low Countries 1560–1700’, in Unity and Discontinuity: Architectural relations between the Southern and Northern Low Countries 1530–1700, ed. by Krista De Jonge and Konrad Ottenheym, Architectura Moderna: 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 251–98 (pp. 252–53). 7 Ozinga, De protestantsche, pp.  19–20. The church lost its original octagonal shape when it was enlarged and transformed into an elongated rectangular building in 1656–59. 8 Guido  H.  P. Steenmeijer, Tot cieraet ende aensien deser stede. Arent van ’s-Gravesande, architect en ingenieur, ca. 1610–1662 (Leiden: Primavera Press, 2005), pp. 169–87; and P. W. Sijnke and others, De Oostkerk. Een heerlyk stuk der Hedendaagsche Bouwkunde. Geschiedenis en restauratie van de Middelburgse Oostkerk (Goes: De Koperen Tuin, 1997). 9 Ozinga, De protestantsche, pp. 45–50; Van Swigchem, Een Huis, pp. 6–7; and T. Mastenbroek and J. J. Bosman, De Grote Kerk Maassluis 1639–1989 (Maassluis: Maassluise Drukkerij, 1989). 3

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Fig. 1: Amsterdam, Zuiderkerk, by Hendrick de Keyser c.s., 1603–1614. Photo: from Ozinga 1929.

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octagonal dome.10 In 1645, the same architect designed the Nieuwe Kerk in Haarlem with a square ground plan and with clear reference to the Temple Hill of Jerusalem, as imagined by Villalpando.11 These churches, too, became prototypes for late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century churches built on centralized ground plans. Centralized churches are regarded — for valid reasons — as the main current in the development of Dutch Protestant church architecture.12 Nevertheless, alongside these buildings were other types developed on the more traditional rectangular basilican ground plan, with a nave and two aisles. The first example of this type in the Dutch Republic is Hendrick de Keyser’s Zuiderkerk in Amsterdam, a pseudo-basilica built in 1603–14 (Figure  1). Its designs were published in the Architectura Moderna of 1631, and the commentary on the engravings points toward the church’s differences from older Catholic examples: in former medieval parish churches, now arranged for Calvinist worship, only the nave, the space around the pulpit, was used. Therefore, in a newly erected Protestant basilica the choir could be omitted, as the author of the Architectura Moderna explains: Dit is een schoon vierkantig en vast werck, met eenen grooten çierlijcken Toorn, […] Dit werck is binnen van goeder ruymde, werdende het dack van’t middel-ruym,’t welck sich hoogh uyt de zydel-daken op-heft, ghedraghen van thien seer groote Pilaren, op de welcke oock de Boogen der zydel-gangen, als oock mede de Stylen des middelruyms komen te rusten, zijnde alles vast en wel gebonden en versekert, en vermits de merckelijcke hooghde des middel-ruyms en veelheyt der Lichten, komt desen wercke seer licht en met allen luchtigh te zijn, […] In dese Kercke en is geen Choor met allen,’t welck met wille is achter-ghelaten, vermits de selve by den Ghereformeerden en openbare Gods-dienst ongebruyckelijck en ten overvloede zijn. This is a beautiful, rectangular, and solid building with a tall and elegant tower […] It has a spacious interior, the roof of the nave rises above those of the side aisles, and it is supported by ten huge columns that carry the posts of the central vault as well as the arches of the aisles. It is of solid construction and, because of the considerable height of the nave and the number of windows, the interior is airy and full of light, […] This church has no choir at all. The choir was omitted on purpose: it would have been superfluous, since Reformed and public religion does not use such a space.13

In 1603, the city authorities who had commissioned the church discussed various proposals for the new Zuiderkerk, among them, presumably, a design for a centralized plan as well.

Ozinga, De protestantsche, pp.  51–55, 162–67; and Ottenheym, ‘Architectuur’, in Jacob van Campen. Het klassieke ideaal in de Gouden Eeuw, ed. by Jacobine Huisken, Ottenheym, and Gary Schwartz (Amsterdam: Architectura et Natura, 1995), pp. 155–99 (pp. 180–84). 11 Ozinga, De protestantsche, pp.  59–66; C.  J.  R. van der Linden, ‘De symboliek van de Nieuwe Kerk van Jacob van Campen te Haarlem’, Oud Holland, 104 (1990), 1–31; and Ottenheym, ‘Architectuur’, pp. 184–87. 12 Ozinga, De protestantsche, p. 6: ‘Bij de meeste nieuw te bouwen Protestantsche kerken van eenig belang koos men een centralen grondvorm’. 13 Architectura Moderna (Amsterdam, 1631), p.  12. Reprinted in Koen Ottenheym, Paul Rosenberg, and Niek Smit, Hendrick de Keyser, Architectura Moderna. Moderne bouwkunst in Amsterdam 1600–1625 (Amsterdam: Sun, 2008), text to plates i–iii. Translation my own. 10

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Fig. 2: Leiderdorp, interior of the protestant village church, c. 1620, architect unknown. Photo: author 1982.

Fig. 2bis: idem, exterior

They consciously approved a design based on the traditional, basilican church type, because they considered this the safest and least expensive solution.14 When, several years later in 1620, Hendrick de Keyser and his colleagues from the city building company had to build a very large new church in the centre of the new ring of canals, called the Westerkerk, they once again took the scheme of the three aisle basilica as their point of reference. The Westerkerk is in every way a superior reworking of the Zuiderkerk. It, too, is a rectangular church, six bays long, and without a choir. ‘[H]et formulier gemaeckt op de oude maniere als wesende geacht het seeckerste ende oncostelijckste, sal worden gevolgt’. Amsterdam City Archive, Vroedschapsnotulen (City council resolutions), 14 June 1603. I. H. van Eeghen, ‘De wording van de Zuiderkerk’, Maandblad Amstelodamum, 45 (1958), 193–97 (p. 197); and Ottenheym, R. Rosenberg, N. Smit, Hendrick de Keyser, Architectura Moderna. Moderne bouwkunst in Amsterdam 1600–1625 (Amsterdam: Sun, 2008), p. 52.

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The central nave, however, is enhanced by a clerestory and two transepts (at the second and fifth bays). The ground plan and spatial organization of the Westerkerk could therefore be interpreted as two Greek crosses in tandem. It is interesting to note that in the historiography of Dutch Protestant church architecture, the latter interpretation is consistently repeated, whereas the church’s origin in the basilican tradition is neglected. In the dominant historiographic narrative, the centralized plan is regarded as the ‘avant garde’ of seventeenth-century Dutch Protestant church architecture, leaving the rectangular, three-aisle plan in unwelcome, old-fashioned territory.15 Indeed, apart from the Zuiderkerk and the Westerkerk, other examples of seventeenth-century basilican Protestant churches in the Dutch Republic are rare and can only be found in small villages like Leiderdorp (c.  1620, Figure 2) and Schermerhorn (1634–36)16 — outside the mainstream evolution of Protestant church architecture. The church of Leiderdorp was erected on the foundations of the former medieval parish church that had been demolished during the 1574 siege of Leiden. During the building campaign of the 1620s, only the nave was rebuilt — for the same reasons, obviously, as were adduced for the Zuiderkerk. Schermerhorn presumably had a comparable history, but this church received a polygonal apse. In both interiors the nave and the aisles are divided by heavy Doric-Tuscan columns supporting pointed arches. Nevertheless, in both cases the overall impression is that of a traditional, late Gothic village church. From this point of view, Amsterdam’s 1603 Zuiderkerk can only be regarded as an isolated experiment, removed from the tradition of the centralized Protestant church that had started in Willemstad in 1595; the Zuiderkerk, after all, gave rise only to ‘mediocre’ offspring in remote places outside the epicentres of contemporary Dutch architecture. Although true within the context of its narrow perspective, this interpretation remains unsatisfactory because it does not take into account developments in Protestant church architecture outside the Dutch Republic, changes in which building masters from the Low Countries had even participated. Court Chapels for Scandinavian Kings Protestant church architecture had already had quite a long history when the octagon of Willemstad was under construction in the 1590s. The first building in early modern Europe that was erected specifically for a non-Catholic Christian community is the 1430 church of the followers of Jan Hus in Tabor, Bohemia.17 In contrast to the radical liturgy of the Hussites, the architecture of the Tabor church follows the traditional model of a three-aisle Hallenkirche, comparable to any Catholic example of the period (the exterior was much altered in the 1530s). This early example once again illustrates that Protestantism did not need a new building type, and that the traditional three-aisle Ozinga, De protestantsche, p. 5: ‘(ten onzent) sluit de in het begin der ontwikkeling staande Amsterdamsche Zuiderkerk (1603–11) zich aan bij het uit de vermenging van pseudo-basiliek en hallekerk geboren specifiek-Hollandsche kerktype uit  de  nadagen der Gothiek en is de Amsterdamsche Westerkerk (1620–31) nog geenszins vrij van de middeleeuwschbasilicale idee’. 16 Ozinga, De protestantsche, pp. 113, 122–23. 17 Kai Wenzel, ‘Protestantischer Kirchenbau in Böhmen während des Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit. Ein Überblick’, in Protestantischer Kirchenbau, ed. by Harasimowicz, pp. 283–98. 15

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scheme could serve the new religion quite well: it was primarily the iconography of the decoration and the interior micro-architecture of Protestant churches that registered as un-Catholic. The same can be said of the first spaces created for the Lutheran faith at German courts:18 the palatine chapels of Schloss Hartenfels at Torgau (inaugurated by Luther himself in 1544)19 and the court chapel at the Dresden Residenz (1549–55).20 All of these were gallery chapels and, in their architectural design, do not differ greatly from Catholic court chapels from the same period. In these early years of the Reformation, there had not yet arisen a specifically Lutheran or Calvinist type of church (although there were of course differences, from the very beginning, in the liturgy and thus in the use of church furniture). In some places, Lutherans and Calvinist even used the same buildings, albeit at different hours.21 Scandinavian court chapels were among the first examples of prestigious religious spaces purpose-designed for Protestantism, and several building masters from the Low Countries were involved in designing and building them. In 1574, King Frederik II of Denmark commissioned the complete rebuilding of Kronborg Castle, which is situated near Elsinore on the Sound. Financed by the almost inexhaustible income from the Sound Toll, Kronborg was to become the most prestigious castle in late sixteenth-century northern Europe. Surrounded by a magnificent fortress, it was a compelling monument to the king’s power and a model for many building campaigns elsewhere.22 To work on this prominent project, Frederik II invited building masters, craftsmen, and military engineers from the Low Countries.23 The leading masters in the main building campaign of 1577–86 were Hans van Paesschen, Hans Floris, and Antonis van Opbergen, who, in turn, invited other master builders, stone masons, and sculptors like Hans van Steenwinckel, Gert van Egen, and Gert van Groningen.24 During the previous decades, the ruling princes of northern Europe had invited sculptors from the Low Countries to work on several royal commissions, mostly funeral monuments. Nevertheless, the demand for Netherlandish expertise at the new royal castle was remarkable because residences of this scale had not been built in the Low Countries themselves, since work at the palaces of Breda and Boussu had been provisionally terminated in the early 1550s.25 The Antwerp Town Hall (1561–65) Dieter Grossmann, ‘Die Bedeutung der Schlosskapellen für den protestantischen Kirchenbau’, in Renaissance in NordMitteleuropa I, ed.  by Georg Ulrich Grossmann, Schriften des Weserrenaissance-Museums Schloss Brake: 4 (München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1990), pp.  127–47; Hugo Johannsen, ‘The Protestant Palace Chapel: Monument to Evangelical Religion and Sacred Rulership’, in Masters, Meanings & Models: Studies in the Art and Architecture of the Renaissance in Denmark. Essays published in Honour of Hugo Johannsen, ed.  by Michael Andersen, Ebbe Nyborg, and Mogens Vedsø (Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, 2010), pp. 3–53. 19 J. Herzog and A. Rothe, Die Schlosskirche zu Torgau. Beiträge zum 450-jährigen Jubiläum der Einweihung durch Martin Luther am 5. Oktober 1544 (Torgau: Torgauer Geschichtsverein, 1994). 20 Heinrich Magirius, Die evangelische Schlosskapelle zu Dresden aus kunstgeschichtlicher Sicht, Sächsische Studien zur älteren Musikgeschichte: 2 (Altenburg: Reinhold Verlag, 2009). 21 This was the case, for instance, in Stockholm with the Tyske Kyrke (Sta. Gertruds Kyrka). 22 For an overview of Kronborg’s building history, see Johannsen, ‘Helsingør: Kronborg castle’, in The Dictionary of Art, ed. by Jane Turner (London: Macmillan; New York: Grove, 1996), xiv, pp. 368–70. 23 The Low Countries at the Crossroads: Netherlandish Architecture as an Export Product in Early Modern Europe (1480– 1680), ed. by Ottenheym and De Jonge, Architectura Moderna: 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). 24 Johannsen, ‘Stonemasons in Denmark from the reign of Frederik II (1559–1588) and Christian IV (1588–1648)’, in Masters, Meanings & Models, ed. by Andersen, Nyborg, and Vedsø, pp. 161–83; and Johannsen, ‘The Steenwinckels: The Success Story of a Netherlandish Immigrant Family in Denmark’, in The Low Countries at the Crossroads, ed. by Ottenheym and De Jonge, pp. 128–41 (for Kronborg: pp. 130–31). 25 G. W. C. van Wezel, Het paleis van Hendrik III, graaf van Nassau te Breda (Zeist: Rijksdienst voor de Monumentenzorg; Zwolle: Waanders, 1999); and Le Château de Boussu, ed. by De Jonge and Marcel Capouillez, Etudes et Documents, série Monuments et Sites: 8 (Namur: Ministère de la Région Wallonne, 1998). 18

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Fig. 3: Kronborg (Denmark), court chapel, 1576–82. Photo: author 2012.

was the only grand building project that may have generated contemporary fame for the Netherlandish building masters. With its palace-like scale it could in any case demonstrate quite well what a palace in the latest all’antica style might look like. Not surprisingly, many leading figures at the Kronborg building site had connections to this earlier undertaking in Antwerp. Hans van Paesschen, the first surveying architect of Kronborg in 1574, for instance, was probably related to Hendrick van Paesschen, who had assisted the sculptor-architect Cornelis Floris with both the Antwerp Town Hall and the London Stock Exchange.26 A few years later, Hans van Paesschen was replaced by Hans Floris, son of the painter Frans Floris and nephew to Cornelis Floris.27 Kronborg is a true royal residence: its façades are clad in stone and it is surrounded by strong modern military fortifications. It is a four-wing complex with a square courtyard: the royal apartments are located in the north wing, while the court chapel (on the ground floor) and the great hall (above) are situated in the south wing. The connecting west wing contains several other state rooms; the east wing is merely a covered passage from royal apartment to chapel. The architectural layout of the castle chapel (1576–82), which was designed for the Lutheran religion, differs from previous examples in Saxony. Instead of one rectangular space surrounded by a superposition of arched galleries, the Kronborg chapel is a three-aisled hall church, five bays long, ending at the short eastern end of the wing where the altar is positioned (Figure 3). Two rows of classical Doric columns divide the nave from 26 27

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both aisles and support the groined vaults. In the northern aisle a richly sculptured wooden gallery was installed with the royal loge that is accessible from the corridor connecting the chapel with the royal apartments. The southern aisle remains an open space. Abundant light enters Gothic-style windows with pointed arches and a kind of tracery, a window type that was recognized elsewhere in the sixteenth century as kirchisch (‘churchly’).28 It is not known who was responsible for the chapel’s design, whether one of the Netherlandish masters or someone from the king’s circle. Whatever the case, the designer chose not to imitate the German Lutheran palatine chapels but, rather, to transform the model of the Hallenkirche, traditionally used for freestanding parish churches, into an enclosed chapel. Elsewhere in Scandinavia and the Baltic region, Kronborg Castle and its chapel were regarded as models for royal architecture. The Swedish kings of the late sixteenth century eagerly strove to have their power and prestige recognized after Gustav Vasa reestablished their independence from the Danish Crown in the 1520s. As in Denmark, royal funeral monuments and royal residences were their first concern. The kings followed their Danish rival’s strategies for improving courtly arts and architecture in order to keep up appearances and to reflect their reconfirmed status. In the last years of his life, Gustav Vasa began inviting artists from the Low Countries to Sweden.29 Willem Boy from Mechelen, for instance, was appointed painter to the Swedish court. Although only a few portraits can be attributed to him, Boy was a leading sculptor and architect at court until his death in 1592.30 He remained closely associated with the Low Countries even while working in Stockholm, returning to the Low Countries for several years to establish a workshop in Antwerp and to execute his first prestigious project, the tomb of Gustav Vasa in Uppsala Cathedral, which was commissioned in 1562 (and finally installed in 1576). Gustav Vasa’s sons Erik  XIV (r.  1560–68) and John  III (r.  1568–92) both possessed a strong interest in the arts and architecture as a means by which the Swedish monarchy could be positively and powerfully represented. Erik XIV kept several architectural treatises in his library and John III was himself an active amateur architect, writing elaborate instructions to his professional architects that specified the details of his building projects.31 Their most important undertaking was the transformation of the old castle of Stockholm, Tre Kronor, into an up-to-date royal residence comparable to the splendid palace of their archenemy in Denmark. In 1577, Boy became the architect of Tre Kronor.32 John III wanted to transform the military stronghold into a permanent royal residence by creating a new series of royal apartments in the eastern wing of the old High Castle. The pointed windows of the old structure were replaced, as ordered by the king himself, by rectangular ones ‘in the architectonic manner’.33 In the 1580s, the former household courtyard Ludger  J. Sutthoff, Gotik im Barock; zur Frage der Kontinuität des Stiles ausserhalb seiner Epoche. Möglichkeiten der Motivation bei Stilwahl (Münster: Lit, 1990), pp. 45–51. 29 Ottenheym, ‘Travelling Architects from the Low Countries and their Patrons’, in The Low Countries at the Crossroads, ed. by Ottenheym and De Jonge, pp. 54–88 (p. 59). 30 August Hahr, Villem Boy.  Bildhuggaren och Byggmästeren. Studier i Johan  III’s Renässans II (Uppsala: Akademiska Bokhandeln, 1910); and Renässansen Konst, ed. by Göran Alm and others, Signum svenska konsthistoria (Lund: Signum, 1996), pp. 43–113, 291–367. 31 Inga Lena Ångström-Grandien, ‘The Reception of the Classical Ideal in Swedish 16th-Century Art and Architecture’, in The Problem of Classical Ideal in the Art and Architecture of the Countries around the Baltic Sea, ed. by Krista Kodres and others, Estonian Academy of Arts, Proceedings: 13 (Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Arts, 2003), pp. 32–54. 32 Martin Olssen and Tord Olson Nordberg, Stockholms Slotts Historia I. Det Gamla Slottet (Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Söners, 1940), pp. 103–69. 33 Ångström-Grandien, ‘The Reception’, p. 45. 28

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Fig. 4: Stockholm, court chapel of the former Tre Kroner Castle, 1588–92. Drawing from Olssen & Nordberg 1940.

on the north side of the castle was transformed into the new and prestigious central court by creating a western wing with new royal apartments and a new court chapel in the lower northern wing (1588–92). The chapel was an elongated, rectangular hall church, 50 metres long and 12.5 metres wide, located on the ground floor (Figure 4).34 The interior space was seven bays long and was divided into a nave and two aisles by Doric columns of Swedish marble. The chapel ended in a square choir in the north-eastern tower of the forecourt, covered by one single large ribbed vault, higher than the ogival cross vaults of the nave and aisles. The king’s private place of worship was at the western end, above the entrance; it connected with his private apartment. Above the choir in the north-east tower — and invisible from the Lutheran chapel below — a Catholic chapel had been installed for the king’s consort, Queen Catherine Jagellonica, daughter of the king of Poland. Seventeenth-century descriptions and depictions of the exterior of Stockholm’s castle Tre Kronor suggest that the royal Danish castle Kronborg had been a point of reference. The chapel, too, with its astylar exterior, pointed windows, and interior Doric columns, could be compared to the chapel of Kronborg. Nevertheless, in 1692–96, the court chapel of Tre Kronor was replaced by a magnificent new one by Nicodemus Tessin (which in turn was replaced by another new Tessin chapel after the devastating fire of 1697). On that occasion, some of the marble columns by Boy were transferred and reused in the chapel of Mälsåker Castle on the island of Selaön (on the Mälaren Lake), where their luxurious quality and refined finish still can be admired, albeit in a chapel of more modest scale, and without their pedestals (Figure 5).35 Olssen and Nordberg, Stockholms Slotts, p. 198. Olssen and Nordberg, Stockholms Slotts, plate 41a. Mälsåker Castle designed by Nicodemus Tessin the Elder for Gustaf Soop beginning in the 1660s.

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Fig. 5: Mälsåker Castle (Sweden), chapel with some columns from the former royal chapel of Tre Kroner Castle, Stockholm. Photo the Mälsåker website www.malsaker.nu.

Parish Churches in Stockholm The refined taste of the Tre Kronor palatine chapel seems to contrast with the rough character of the two parish churches that Boy and his colleague Hendrick van Huwen/ Hoeven (who was also from the Low Countries) had constructed in the meantime: Saint Clara’s Church (Klara Kyrka) and Saint James’ Church ( Jakobs Kyrka), both in what were then the northern outskirts of Stockholm. These parish churches were commissioned by King John  III, and here, too, one might reasonably assume that he played a decisive role in the churches’ design. Saint Clara’s was built in 1577–90 as a single nave church with heavy cross rib vaults, all in brick, a polygonal apse in the east, and a tower in the west. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both the interior decoration and the exterior appearance of the building were modified.36 As far as we can reconstruct its image today, the original church seems to have resembled a monumental medieval parish church. The second church, Saint James, still has its original interior. King John  III had commissioned the church in 1580; construction started a mere eight years later, again under supervision of Boy and Van Huwen, but it came to a premature end in 1593 after the king’s death. The walls and interior pillars, however, seem to have been almost completed by that time. The church was almost finished by 1635–38, and by 1642–43 the These were modernized by Carl Hårleman after the fire of 1751 (when the walls and vaults seem to have been preserved) and again in 1884–86 by Hugo Zetterwall, who renewed all the exterior brickwork.

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Fig. 6: Stockholm, St Jakobs kyrka (St. James’ Church), 1580–93, by Willem Boy and Hendrik van Huwen, vaults by Hans Fester 1642–1643. Photo: author 2010.

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vaults had been erected by master mason Hans Ferster from Gdansk.37 As a result, most of the elements on the exterior, such as the portals and the tower, date from the seventeenth century. The original sixteenth-century design of the interior, however, is still recognizable (Figure  6). It is a pseudo-basilican structure with a nave and two aisles: six bays long, with a choir and an apse, the interior is dominated by two rows of heavy stone columns. Notwithstanding their considerable height, the columns look rather squat due to their large diameter. They are, nevertheless, endowed with octagonal bases and with capitals profiled according to classical models. The result is remarkable: the church’s interior (aside from the complex seventeenth-century star vaults) seems to be modelled after Romanesque or early Gothic churches elsewhere in Sweden. And yet, the sculptor-architect who built Saint James earned his fame by his exquisite mastering of all’antica and fashionable, contemporary architectural design. Apparently, Boy was not asked to create a church that would meet international all’antica standards. We may presume that he was engaged for his skill with working in stone and his ability to manage complex building sites after the basic designs had been determined. But, presumably, the stylistic decorum was not chosen by the architect. It must have been the king who wanted to give both parish churches such an archaic character; we might explain his conscious preference for this style as a way of referring to older Swedish building traditions — that is, to a native antiquity. Antiquarian treatises of the Swedish Middle Ages, which were written from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, make clear that people were unaware of the true date of Swedish antiquities like rune stones and Romanesque churches.38 Some of these old churches were regarded as former pagan temples that had been transformed into churches by the first Christian kings of Sweden.39 As a result, medieval ruins could be thought by early moderns to be antique monuments. These ideas circulated at court as well. King John III’s keen interest in both architecture and history is well documented, as is his conscious use of an outdated style. In 1574, Lucas de Werdt sculpted the royal monument in the Riddarholm church choir in Stockholm to commemorate two heroic medieval kings of Sweden.40 To emphasize the venerable age of the Swedish monarchy, these historic funeral monuments were equipped not with antique ornament but with ‘Gothic’ fittings, executed in traditional, well-polished, brown stone. Only the cartouches on the sides of the tombs were detailed as contemporary strap work.41 Perhaps the consciously archaic appearance of Saint James’ church (and perhaps also of Saint Clara’s) had a comparable function that was intended to refer to an earlier episode of the Swedish monarchy and to showcase the power and independence of the realm throughout its history. Barbo Flodin, Murmästaren Hans Ferster, verksamheten i Sverige 1634–1653 (Lindigo: Acoprint, 1974), pp. 16–21. Kristoffer Neville, ‘The Land of Goths and Vandals: The Visual Presentation of Gothicism at the Swedish Court, 1550–1700’, Renaissance Studies, 27 (2013), 435–59. 39 Old Uppsala Cathedral, for instance, was believed to have been a pagan temple for all the major Scandinavian gods; it is depicted as such in Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Rome: Giovanni M. Viotto, 1555). See also Neville, ‘The Land of Goths’. 40 These are King Magnus Ladulås, who died in 1290, and Karl Knutsson Bonde, who died in 1470. Renässansen Konst, ed. by Alm and others, pp. 315–16. 41 Ottenheym, ‘Sculptors’ Architecture: The International Scope of Cornelis Floris and Hendrick de Keyser’, in The Low Countries at the Crossroads, ed. by Ottenheym and De Jonge, pp. 102–27 (p. 113). 37 38

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Parish Churches in Latvia When, in 1561, the remaining territory of the Teutonic Order in today’s Latvia was transformed into a secular state, the Duchy of Courland, it adopted Lutheranism as its state religion.42 At that time, Protestantism had been a dominant religion in the region for several decades. In the 1520s, the city of Riga was already a major centre of the new religion, and in 1561 it acquired the privileged rights of an independent city-republic. The capital of the new duchy was Mitau (today’s Jelgava), where the first duke, Gotthard Kettler, transformed the former Teutonic convent outside the city walls into his new residence.43 A 1567 inspection of the duchy had revealed a serious shortage of places for Lutheran worship and education. Duke Gotthard consequently ordered the nobility to construct new parish churches, schools, and social institutions throughout his territory.44 In 1573–74, the Duke himself commissioned two Lutheran churches in his capital: Saint Anna’s Church, for the Latvian population of Mitau/Jelgava, and the Holy Trinity Church, for the German-speaking community.45 The Saint Anna’s Church of 1573 was apparently just a wooden structure; it was only in 1619–41 that it was replaced by a brick building modelled after the Holy Trinity Church.46 The foundation stone of the later was dated 1574 but its construction was interrupted in 1579. Thanks to the support of Duchess Anna, Gotthard Kettler’s widow, work progressed after 1592 and the church was inaugurated in the early seventeenth century.47 Holy Trinity was originally a pseudo-basilica with a long nave (without a clerestory) flanked by aisles, all under one roof. The church had a solid tower at its west entrance and a lower choir with an apse on the east side. In the mid-nineteenth century, the roof was taken down and replaced with separate roofs for the nave and aisles, which transformed the pseudo-basilican structure into a true basilica with a clerestory (Figure 7).48 The architectural details, both inside and outside, had much in common with the latest fashion in the Low Countries: the exterior walls included pilasters supporting a decorative frieze, all in red brick (though these were plastered over during the mid-nineteenth-century transformation). Inside, two rows of Doric-Tuscan columns supported rusticated arches and an upper structure with arched niches that became windows after the alteration of the roof. Elongated consoles placed in the walls above the columns supported the star vaults of the nave. The remarkable architecture of Holy Trinity was rather similar to the extension in 1586–89 of Saint John’s Church in Riga; the design of the Mitau church is, therefore, generally attributed to the same architect, Joris Jorissen Frese. Saint John’s is the former Dominican church and dates from the fourteenth century. The interior space is a single nave of four This paragraph, unless noted otherwise, is based on Ojārs Spārītis, ‘Joris Jorissen Frese and the Origins of Renaissance Sacral Architecture in Livonia’, in The Low Countries at the Crossroads, ed. by Ottenheym and De Jonge, pp. 287–99. 43 For complete visual documentation of pre-WWII Mitau/Jelgava, see the DVD by Elita Grosmane and Ivo Simsons, Jelgava: Arhitekturas un makslas virtuala rekonstrucija. Mitau: virtuelle Rekonstruktion der Architektur und Kunst (Riga: Latvijas Maklas akademijas Makslas vestures instituts, 2008). 44 Spārītis, ‘Joris Jorissen Frese’, p. 293. 45 Theodor Kallmeyer, Die evangelische Kirchen und Prediger Kurlands (Riga: Kurl. Gesellschaft für Literatur und Kunst, 1910), pp. 48–51. 46 Grosmane and Simsons, Jelgava. 47 Both churches were damaged during World War II. In 1953, Saint Anna’s was rebuilt with only some references to its former design; in 1949, the ruins of the Holy Trinity were entirely destroyed with the exception of its entrance tower. Nevertheless, its architecture is well documented by pre-war photographs and surveying plans. 48 Spārītis, ‘Joris Jorissen Frese’, p. 295. 42

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Fig. 7: Mitau/Jelgava (Latvia), former Holy Trinity church, built from 1574 onwards. Pre–1945 photograph.

bays with high and richly elaborated net vaults; the extension of 1586–89 is somewhat lower and narrower. This is a pseudo-basilican structure, three bays long, with a polygonal apse (Figure 8). Here, too, the exterior walls are enhanced with pilasters and a decorative frieze above, all executed in brick with some stone details. The windows are filled with Gothicizing tracery comparable to church windows elsewhere in late sixteenth-century northern 369

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Fig. 8: Riga (Latvia), St. John’s Church, choir of 1586–89 by Joris Frese, exterior. Photo: author 2007.

Europe (the kirchische Fenster mentioned above). In the interior, two rows of Tuscan-Doric columns divide the nave and aisles, supporting the transverse arches and the vaults. Blind windows vary the rhythm of the pseudo-clerestory in the upper zone (Figure 9).

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Fig. 9: Idem, interior. Photograph: author 2007.

Frese had already received various commissions from the city authorities when, in 1576, he was officially appointed as city architect. By then, he was likely also engaged by the ducal court at Mitau/Jelgava, which hired him to transform the residence and, presumably, to build the Trinitatis Church. We do not know, however, how far this church had

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proceeded when building activities were shut done in 1579, so it is possible that Frese was only engaged in 1592, when construction continued. It is difficult to know which of the two church designs was completed first, that of the Trinitatis Church in Mitau or of Saint John’s in Riga. For now, the two may be regarded as basically contemporary, leaving the question of their relative order unresolved. Although the pseudo-basilican churches enjoyed a long tradition, both Latvian buildings show remarkable novelties in their architectural detailing: their use of classical columns and pilasters (some even ‘folded’ around the corners of the polygonal apse); the trapezoidal consoles supporting the vault; and the decorative interplay of the vault ribs. These features find parallels in contemporary prints from the Low Countries, such as Vredeman de Vries’ engraved church interiors.49 Unfortunately, there is no specific information about the possible exchange of information between the Low Countries and Latvia about such architectural novelties, and not much is known about either the architect’s origin or his connections to the Low Countries. Frese came to Riga in 1565 as a sculptor and worked there as an engineer and architect, not an unusual combination of crafts at the time.50 Even if he did not himself have family ties to the Low Countries, commerce between Riga and both Antwerp and Amsterdam was intense, and in any case an artist in his position may have been aware of the well-known printed sources from Flanders. Conclusions Decades before the first permanent church for the Protestant religion was created in the Dutch Republic, architects, sculptors, and building masters from the Low Countries were involved in the design and construction of prestigious buildings for the new religion elsewhere. The six major examples discussed in this paper show a variety of longitudinal plans. They all differ from the centralized design, which was to become a kind of standard solution for seventeenth-century Dutch churches. The cases clearly illustrate that Netherlandish architects abroad did not merely copy what they knew from home. Instead, their work can be regarded as a kind of laboratory in which new solutions and directions were developed that might later be followed at home. The question remains as to how these building are to be integrated into the architectural history of the Low Countries. Court chapels for both the Danish king at Kronborg and the Swedish king at Stock­holm were three-aisle hall churches with high rising classicizing columns. This scheme did not follow the type of palatine chapel with galleries that had been favoured at northern German courts. Nevertheless, the Scandinavian examples may have become a source of inspiration for Protestant city churches in Germany that had princely patronage, such as those in Bückeburg and Wolffenbüttel. We do not, however, find this kind of church in seventeenth-century Dutch architecture. The Protestant parish churches in the Baltic with which Netherlandish masters had been involved were either single-nave structures or pseudo-basilicas. The churches in Stockholm, with their remarkable archaic features, must have been designed according to the Spārītis, ‘Joris Jorissen Frese’, pp. 298–99. Spārītis, ‘The Architect Joris Joriszn Frese’, in Beyond Traditional Borders: Eight Centuries of Latvian-Dutch Relations, ed. by Hanno Brand and others (Riga: Apgads Zelta Grauds, 2006), pp. 173–76; and Spārītis, ‘Joris Jorissen Frese’, pp. 289–90.

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specific wishes and ideals of the king, with reference to regional history. In this sense these designs were unique and not suitable models for imitation, although comparable solutions that refer to local historical architecture are to be found elsewhere in Europe. The Protestant churches constructed in the last quarter of the sixteenth century in Latvia, on the other hand, were also longitudinal structures but were designed in a contemporary all’antica style. These are among the first examples of prestigious freestanding Protestant parish churches. The churches of Frese predate related developments in the Dutch Republic, whereas Hendrick de Keyser’s Zuiderkerk of 1603 has a comparable layout and certain ornamental details in common. Given the heavy commerce between Holland and Riga, there must have been people in Amsterdam who had seen the new churches in Latvia — if not in Mitau then certainly in Riga. It is impossible to say whether Hendrick de Keyser knew the Latvian churches when he received the commission to design his first city church in Amsterdam. It is certainly possible that he came to comparable solutions by using the same ornamental sources and traditional basilican building type without ever having heard about Frese’s work. Nevertheless, these examples from the late sixteenth century may be regarded as a kind of pedigree for or immediate ancestor to De Keyser’s Zuiderkerk. From this wider northern European perspective, then, the early basilican Protestant church was not such an isolated case after all.

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An Italian Voice on the Dutch Revolt The Work of Francesco Lanario in a European Perspective Nina Lamal and Hans Cools University of St Andrews Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences – Fryske Akademy / KU Leuven

Introduction In the seventeenth century, the Revolt in the Netherlands was an immensely popular subject for history writers. Carlos Coloma (1566–1637), one of the most important Spanish military commanders in the Habsburg Netherlands, stated this in the prologue to his own account of the Revolt, writing that authors of all European nations had composed their own histories of the conflict.1 However, his prologue was mainly a critique of the existing Italian histories and, more specifically, of the histories written by two Genoese authors: the patrician and military entrepreneur Pompeo Giustiniani (1569–1616) and the merchant Gerolamo Franchi di Conestaggio (1530–c.  1616).2 Coloma denounced these histories mainly for neglecting the Spanish victories and for embellishing the Italian achievements during the war. In his overview, Coloma mentioned a ‘Neapolitan historian’ who had written a compendium on the wars in the Netherlands and who had stayed in the Netherlands during the Twelve Years Truce (1609–21). This Neapolitan historian was Francesco Lanario, author of Le guerre di Fiandra brevemente narrate, a brief account of the wars in the Low

Carlos Coloma, Las guerras de los Estados Baxos, desde el año de MDLXXXVIII hasta el de MDXCIX (Cambrai: Jean de la Rivière, 1622). Subsequent editions in Antwerp, 1624 and 1635, as well as in Barcelona, 1627. For more on this author and his works, see Miguel Ángel Guill Ortega, Carlos Coloma, 1566–1637: Espada y pluma de los tercios (Madrid: Editorial Club Universitario, 2007). 2 Pompeo Giustiniani, Della guerra di Fiandra, libri sei (Antwerp: Joachim Trognesius, 1609). For a biography of Giustiniani, see the entry by Dario Busolini in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (hereafter abbreviated as DBI) (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 2001), lvii, pp.  362–64; and Gerolamo Franchi di Conestaggio, Delle guerre della Germania Inferiore Istoria. Divisa in dieci libri (Venice: Antonio Pinelli, 1614). A  biographical sketch of Conestaggio and bibliography including various editions of his work are in Maristella Cavanna Ciappina, DBI, (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1982), xxvii, pp. 770–72. Recently Conestaggio has received attention in Dutch historiography: see Van Gelder, ‘In liefde en werk met de Lage Landen verbonden: de Genuese koopman en literator Giralomo Conestaggio (ca. 1530–1614/15)’, in Internationale handelsnetwerken en culturele contacten in de vroegmoderne Nederlanden, ed. by Van Gelder and Esther Meijers (Maastricht: Shaker publishing, 2009), pp. 43–53; and Cees Reijner, ‘Een Italiaanse verdediger van de Opstand? De internationale controverse rond het werk van Gerolamo Conestaggio’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 125 (2012), 173–87. 1

Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century: Urban Perspectives, ed. by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Turnhout, 2017 (Studies in European Urban History, 41), pp. 375-388. F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.114017

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Countries.3 Lanario’s short history was first published in Antwerp in 1615 and was almost immediately reprinted in Venice (1616), Milan (1616), and Naples (1617). Whereas Venice remained one of Italy’s main printing centres, Milan and Naples were bulwarks of Habsburg power on the peninsula. Moreover, Lanario’s history of the Dutch Revolt was translated into French, Spanish, and German and was printed in Paris (1618), Madrid (1623), and Cologne (1625). In this article we analyse the European reception of Lanario’s work, focusing on its various editions and translations. In this way, we aim to answer the recent appeals of scholars to study early modern ‘translation cultures’ in order to enhance our understanding of early modern societies.4 In an exploratory essay, Peter Burke proposed a set of basic questions for studying translations, namely: who translated, why, what was translated, how, for whom, and with what intentions.5 Burke has shown how translators could transform a history work to fit a new and different culture, and has labelled that process as ‘cultural translation’. The very notion of adapting a work to the cultural context in which it functioned also underpins our investigation; we thus focus on the cities where Lanario’s work was published and translated: Why there and not elsewhere? Was the content of his history adapted to the various readerships and contexts of specific urban centres? A Biographical Sketch Around 1607 or 1608, Francesco Lanario, then a young Neapolitan nobleman, set off for Antwerp.6 He went to the Netherlands to replace his brother Don Antonio, a captain in the Spanish-Habsburg army who had died in 1606 at the siege of Rheinsberg.7 Indeed, the army was a truly multinational force, and many of the soldiers who fought in it were Italians. Countless young Italian noblemen who dreamt of personal and military glory were drawn to the battlefields of the Low Countries to serve for some years in the Habsburg army. Going to the Netherlands became a prerequisite for young Italian aristocrats, whether they came from Habsburg ruled dominions such as Naples or Milan or from satellite states such as Tuscany, Genoa, or even the Papal States. The king rewarded their service with various favours such as lands, noble titles, or prestigious positions in the administration of Habsburg Italy.8 Francesco Lanario, Le gverre di Fiandra brevemente narrate da don Francesco Lanario del consiglio di gverra di sua m. cattolica ne’ Paesi Bassi (Antwerp: Hieronymus Verdussen, 1615). Quotations in this article are from this first Antwerp edition. 4 Sara Barker and Brenda Hosington, Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print and Culture in Britain (Leiden: Brill, 2012); and Peter Burke and Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 5 Burke, ‘Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe’, in Cultural Translation, ed. by Burke and Hsia, pp. 7–38. 6 Lanario was born around 1589; the year of his death is unknown. There is hardly any scholarly literature available on his life or on his literary achievements. For a brief overview of Lanario’s career, see Fedele Marletta, La vita e la cultura catanese ai tempi di don Francesco Lanario (sec. XVII) (Catania: Archivio Storico per la Sicilia Orientale, 1931); and Marletta ‘Don Francesco Lanario e gli scrittori leccesi’, Rinascenza salentina, 11.1 (1943), 1–19. More recently, Enos Mantoani published a biographical entry online: http://www.dutchrevolt.leiden.edu/dutch/geschiedschrijvers/Pages/lanario.aspx [accessed 11 July 2013]. 7 Lanario wrote briefly on the death of his brother in his history of the Dutch Revolt. Cf. Lanario, Le gverre, p. 186. 8 Giampiero Brunelli, Soldati del papa. Politica militare e nobiltà nello Stato della Chiesa (1560–1644) (Rome: Carocci, 2003), pp. 79–81; Claudio Donato, ‘The Profession of Arms and the Nobility in Spanish Italy: Some Considerations’, in Spain in Italy: Politics, Society and Religion, 1500–1700, ed. by Thomas J. Dandelet and John A. Marino (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), pp. 311–21; Gregory Hanlon, The Twilight of a Military Tradition: Italian Aristocrats and European Conflicts, 1560–1800 (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1998), pp. 7, 69–80, 100–05; and Geoffrey Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567–1659: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries’ Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 26–27, 177–79, 235–36. 3

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Francesco Lanario’s career perfectly fits this pattern. Born of newcomers to Neapolitan nobility, he served the Crown in the Low Countries for seven years before pursuing his career in the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily. Upon his return to Italy, Lanario was admitted as a knight into the military order of Calatrava. In 1617, he became governor of Lecce and the following year he served as governor of the province of Basilicata. In 1620, he was appointed Capitan a Guerra (military commander) of Catania, in which capacity he was responsible for the fortifications and fountains of Catania and other Sicilian cities; he travelled subsequently to the court in Madrid. Meanwhile, King Philip IV (1605/21–65) concluded the social elevation of the Lanario family, granting Francesco the dukedom of Carpignano, an old Apulian fief.9 In 1621, several poets from Lecce and Catania published two volumes of laudatory poems to glorify their mighty patron and his great deeds.10 A number of them mentioned Lanario’s stay in the Netherlands, where he had supposedly fought heroically against the rebels. Pier Angelo de Magistris, for instance, stated that ‘Con la sua man forte e guerriera fa strage d’ogni belga empio e infedele’ (‘Using his strong and martial hands, he slaughtered all faithless and rebellious Belgians’).11 Writing and Publishing in Antwerp Notwithstanding the praise of his admirers, Francesco Lanario had, in reality, arrived too late in the Netherlands to take part in the action. At the time he travelled north, diplomats were negotiating the Twelve Years Truce, which would be concluded in April 1609.12 Stationed in Antwerp and housed in the local citadel, Lanario’s stay in the city must have been rather dull. As he later stated in the dedication of his book to Archduke Albert, he countered this boredom by studying the recent past of the Netherlands and its Revolt.13 Moreover, Lanario read all sorts of histories, written accounts, and pamphlets; and he interviewed fellow veteran soldiers in the Antwerp garrison. Having accumulated all this knowledge, he must have decided at some point to write his own account of the Dutch Revolt. In 1615, just before he left the Low Countries forever, he published, on the advice of his friends, Le guerre di Fiandra brevemente narrate in Antwerp with Hieronymus  I Verdussen (c. 1553–1635). Francesco Lanario was not the only Italian soldier who published a book in Antwerp during the years of the Truce. The Neapolitan Lelio Brancaccio (1560–1637) and the Milanese Lodovico Melzi (1558–1617) wrote military handbooks; the aforementioned It remains unclear precisely when Lanario obtained this dukedom. To the best of our knowledge, when he was appointed Capitan a Guerra in 1620 he was already Duke of Carpignano. For a typology of the seventeenth–century Neapolitan nobility, see Giovanni Muto, ‘Noble Presence and Stratification in the Territories of Spanish Italy’, in Spain in Italy, ed. by Dandelet and Marino, pp. 274–85. 10 Tre idilii con varie e diuerse compositioni. Fatte in lode dell’opere et attioni dell’illustriss. signor. Don Francesco Lanario et Aragona duca di Carpignano, […] Raccolti da Don Giacomo Gravina e dedicati all’illustriss. & eccellentiss. sig. Don Francesco Di Castro conte di Castro (Palermo: Decio Cirillo, 1621); and Varii componimenti volgari, e latini. In lode dell’illustriss. signor. Don Francesco Lanario, et Aragona hora duca di Carpignano, raccolti da Giulio Cesare Grandi, gentil’huomo di Lecce, patritio, & senator Romano (Palermo: Decio Cirillo, 1621). 11 Vari componimenti, p. 6. 12 Willem J. M. van Eysinga, De wording van het Twaalfjarig Bestand van 9 april 1609 (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandse uitgeversmaatschappij, 1959); and Simon Groenveld, Het Twaalfjarig Bestand. 1609–1621. De jongelingsjaren van de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden (The Hague: Haags Historisch Museum, 2009), pp. 33–59. 13 Lanario, Le gverre, p. 1. 9

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Genoese patrician Pompeo Giustiniani dictated his memories of the Siege of Ostend to his confidant, the Tuscan military engineer Giuseppe Gamurini.14 All three drew on their experiences of warfare — their books were full of military details and were lavishly ­illustrated — and all three published their work with the Antwerp publisher Joachim Trognesius (1556–1624). Although Trognesius had a bad reputation on account of his frequent quarrels with his Antwerp colleagues regarding infringement on their monopolies, he maintained his commercial appeal by publishing beautiful books with high-quality engravings that were targeted at an international audience, including these.15 Francesco Lanario’s choice of Verdussen as his printer was thus not in line with the preferences of his peers. Moreover, in contrast to Trognesius’s firm, Hieronymus Verdussen published very few Italian books. Stijn van Rossem has argued that the latter were mostly aimed at a local readership.16 Nevertheless, apart from devotional books, Hieronymus Verdussen specialised in the production of news reports and history books. For this kind of publication he would most likely have had to find buyers outside of Antwerp. In Autumn 1615, Lanario’s book was already on sale at the Frankfurt book fair.17 Yet, in contrast to the publications of his military colleagues-turned-authors, apart from the title page his book contained no illustrations. Instead, Lanario offered his readers a uniquely concise history of the troubles, spanning the half-century between 1559 and 1609 in barely two hundred pages. Clearly, Lanario’s aim while researching and writing had been not only to chase away boredom, but also to analyse the origins of the conflict and the course events had taken in the past half-century. In his preface, Lanario stated that he sought readers among those who would not have time to read the monumental histories of the Dutch Revolt already then available, such as the one published by Cesare Campana (c. 1540–1606) in 1602.18 As we will argue, for this very reason Lanario’s concise history proved to be quite successful throughout Catholic Europe. This success was certainly due in part to Lanario’s precise formulations and clear language. Moreover, in contrast to most other historians of the Dutch Revolt, Lanario was not overtly partisan: he aimed to write what he considered to be a truthful and balanced rendering of the facts. Lelio Brancaccio, I  carichi militari di fra’ Lelio Brancaccio caual. Hierosolomitano del Consiglio collaterale per S.M. cattolica nel Regno di Napoli e suo maestro di campo e consiglier di guerra ne gli Stati di Fiandra (Antwerp: Joachim Trognesius, 1610). For a short biography of Brancaccio, see his entry by Gaspare de Caro in DBI (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1971), xiii, pp. 787–89; and Lodovico Melzo, Regole militari sopra il governo e servitio particolare della cavalleria di Fr.  Lodovico Melzo cavalier di San Giovanni gerosolimitano de i consigli secreto di Milano e di guerra ne’ Paesi Bassi per S.M. Cattolica suo tenente generale della cavalleria (Antwerp: Joachim Trognesius, 1611). For a short biography of Melzo, see his entry by Alessandro Dattero in DBI (Rome, Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 2009), lxxiii, pp. 398–400. On Pompeo Giustianiani, see n. 2. For his collaboration with Gamurini at the Siege of Ostend, see De val van het nieuwe Troje. Het beleg van Oostende, 1601–1604, ed. by Werner Thomas (Louvain: Davidfonds, 2004), p. 167. 15 Fernand Donnet, Les Imprimeurs Trognesius et leur famille (Antwerp: Imprimerie Secelle, 1919), pp. 59–63. For more on Antwerp as a production centre for Italian publications, see Nina Lamal, ‘Publishing Military Books in the Low Countries and in Italy in the Early Seventeenth Century’, in Specialist Markets in the Early Modern Book World, ed. by Sophie Mullins and Richard Kirwan (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 222–39; and Anna E. C. Simoni, ‘Soldier’s Tales: Observations on Italian Military Books Published at Antwerp in the Early 17th Century’, in The Italian Book 1465–1800, ed.  by Dennis Rhodes and Denis Reidy (London: British Library, 1993), pp.  259–85. Melzo’s Regole militari in particular proved to be hugely popular. For instance, in 1615 Archduke Maximilian III of Habsburg ordered his agent to buy a copy at the Frankfurt book fair. Cf. Ursula Stampfer, ‘Niederländische drucke in der Hofbibliothek Erzherzog Maximilian III’, Publication du Centre Européen d’Etudes bourguignonnes, 46 (2006), 273–84 (p. 282). 16 Stijn Van Rossem, ‘The Bookshop of the Counter-Reformation Revisited: The Verdussen Company and the Trade in Catholic Publications, Antwerp, 1585–1648’, Quaerendo, 38 (2008), 306–14. 17 Catalogus universalis pro nundinis Francofurtensibus autumnalibus, de anno MDCXV (Frankfurt: Sigismund Latomi, 1615). 18 Cesare Campana, Della Guerra di Fiandra fatta per difesa della religione (Vicenza: Giorgio Greco, 1602). 14

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Indeed, at first sight, the original edition of Le guerre di Fiandra does not read as an apology for the Habsburg cause. When he deemed it necessary, Lanario criticized the behaviour of the royal troops and their commanders. For instance, he emphasized the repressive character of the Duke of Alba’s policies, and he made no effort to conceal the cruelty of the Spanish troops who sacked the city of Antwerp in the fall of 1576. Lanario also expressed some admiration for the United Provinces, mentioning their leaders’ sense of adventure in sending an expeditionary force to the Far East in the 1590s, and noticing on various occasions their tactical insight on the battlefield. His interpretation of the Revolt in the Netherlands, however, remained largely determined by his own political, religious, and moral convictions. He consistently referred to the rebels as heretics, and he described William of Orange (1533–84), accordingly, as a haughty, overambitious aristocrat who was ‘principal fomentatore de i tumulti’ (‘the principal instigator of the tumult’).19 Such views were in line with traditional Habsburg and Catholic notions regarding the origins of the Revolt.20 Although we know nothing about Lanario’s intellectual training, it is apparent from his work that he was well read. According to the latest fashion in history writing, Lanario did not integrate imagined speeches by the protagonists in his account of the Dutch Revolt, as imitators of the Greek historian Thucydides preferred. Rather, he followed a clear Tacitean style that was characterized by short sentences. Moreover, Lanario seems to have written in order to understand the recent past — not to draw moral lessons from history, as admirers of Cicero from previous generations had done.21 In the final lines of his history, Lanario wanted to transmit to his readers why the Revolt had evolved into a European civil war in which members of nearly all European nations had had their blood spilt. Moreover, he wondered why the Habsburg monarchy had spent such an enormous sum of money on this seemingly endless conflict. In the end, Lanario’s model seems to have been Tacitus rather than Cicero; he was therefore in line with historiographical scholarship as it had developed in the Venetian Republic during the latest decades of the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. Italian Editions of Le Guerre di Fiandra Italian publishers clearly saw the history’s profitable potential. The Venetian publisher and bookseller Tommaso Baglioni probably noticed the Antwerp edition of Le guerre di Fiandra at the Frankfurt book fair in the autumn of 1615. Baglioni, who had a reputation

19 Lanario, Le gverre, pp.  8, 13: ‘fattosi principal mionistro di quell’incendio l’Oranges’ and ‘L’Oranges, principal fomentatore de i tumulti’. 20 Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez, The Dutch Revolt through Spanish Eyes: Self and Other in Historical Texts of Golden Age Spain (c. 1548–1673) (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 78–81. For an overview of Italian historiography on the Dutch Revolt, see Silvia Moretti, ‘La trattatistica italiana e la guerra: il conflitto tra la Spagna e le Fiandre’, Annali dell’Istituto storico italogermanico in Trento, 20 (1994), 129–64. 21 On the debates in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italian historiography between imitators of Thucydides, Cicero, and Tacitus, see William  J. Bouwsma, ‘Three Types of Historiography in Post-Renaissance Italy’, History and Theory, 4 (1965), 303–14; and Giorgo Spini, ‘The Art of History in the Italian Counter Reformation’, in The Late Italian Renaissance, 1525–1630, ed. by Eric Cochrane (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 98–133. For more on Tacitism in particular, see Jan Waszink, ‘Your Tacitism or Mine? Modern and Early-Modern Conceptions of Tacitus and Tacitism’, History of European Ideas, 36 (2010), 375–85.

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for rapidly producing books, immediately prepared his own edition.22 In December 1615, he dedicated the book to his close friend Johannes von Stetten, an Augsburg patrician who had acted several times as the consul of the German merchants in Venice.23 A few months later, in spring 1616, the Venetian edition was available at the Frankfurt fair.24 Baglioni inserted marginalia in the text and added an index, changes devised to help the reader navigate through the text. Baglioni had a fine nose for texts that caused a stir among international readers. He had learned the book trade in the early years of the seventeenth century, while representing his Venetian colleague Roberto Meietti (1550–after 1615) in Frankfurt; in 1610, he had published Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius and put it on sale at the Frankfurt book fair.25 His dedication of Le guerre di Fiandra to Von Stetten seems to indicate that he expected the book to be read and discussed both by the Venetian public and by a wider group of international merchants with an interest in current affairs. Throughout the seventeenth century, Venice remained one of Europe’s hotspots for the commercialization of news. Venetian publishers specialized in contemporary histories and military handbooks, among other subjects, and Lanario’s concise history was suited for that segment of the market.26 Lanario’s text also circulated within the Habsburg territories on the Italian peninsula, however. In 1616, the Venetian edition was quickly re-issued by the Milanese printer Giovanni Battista Bidelli (c. 1580–after 1646).27 Bidelli was one of the most prolific Milanese printers and booksellers, but he was not a very adventurous one: he mainly reissued texts already published by his Venetian counterparts.28 Bidelli had published Pompeo Giustiniani’s work in 1615 and would later print a Spanish translation of Lodovico Melzo’s Regole militari (1619) and Lelio Brancaccio’s Carichi militari (1620).29 Bidelli thus clearly had an interest in texts by Italian soldiers who had served in the Low Countries. Apparently, there must have been a demand for such texts amongst his clients. During those decades, the Duchy of Milan served as the heart of Habsburg power. There, troops were assembled and distributed over all parts of the Empire. At any given moment in the seventeenth century, at least 20,000 soldiers were garrisoned in the Duchy, which made it into one of the most heavily militarized regions of early modern Europe.30 Le guerre di Fiandra dal principio de’ primi motiui in quelle parti, sino al presente breue, e diligentemente narrate da Don Francesco Lanario, del Consiglio di Stato di S.M. Cattolica ne’Paesi Bassi. Aggiuntoui la tauola delle cose piu memorabili. Al molt’illustre, e generosissimo signore, il sig. Giouanni da Stetten (Venice: Tomaso Baglioni, 1616). 23 On the association of German merchants in Venice, the so-called Fondaco dei Tedeschi, see Maartje van Gelder, Trading Places: The Netherlandish Merchants in Early Modern Venice (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), pp. 36–40. On the family von Stetten, see Paul von Stetten, Geschichte der adligen Geschlechter der freyen Reichs-Stadt Augsburg (Augsburg: Haid, 1762), pp. 215–19. 24 Catalogus universalis pro nundinis Francofurtensibus vernanalibus, de anno MDCXV (Frankfurt: Sigismund Latomi, 1616). 25 Angela Nuovo, The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 290. See Alfredo Cioni’s biographical entry on Baglioni in DBI (Rome: Istituto Enciclopedia Italiana,1963), v. 26 Burke, ‘Early Modern Venice as a Center for Information and Communication’, in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797, ed. by John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 389–419 (pp. 399, 402); and Bouwsma, ‘Three Types of Historiography’, pp. 309–14. 27 Lanario, Le gverre di Fiandra brevemente narrate da don Francesco Lanario del consiglio di gverra di sua m. cattolica ne’ Paesi Bassi (Milan: Gio. Battista Bidelli, 1616). 28 Anna Giulia Cavagna and Anja Wolkenhauer, ‘Editoria, tipografia e un alfabeto istoriato nella Milano del Seicento’, Gutenberg Jahrbuch, 76 (2001), 197–210. 29 Lamal, ‘Publishing Military Books’. 30 Stefano D’Amico, Spanish Milan: A City within the Empire, 1535–1706 (New York: Macmillan, 2012), pp. 139–44; and Luis A. Ribot García, ‘Las provincias italianas y la defensa de la monarquía’, in Nel sistema imperiale: l’Italia spagnola, ed. by Aurelio Musi (Naples: Edizione Scientifice Italiana, 1994), pp. 67–92 (p. 70). 22

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In 1617, a Neapolitan edition followed suit.31 This latest version of the book was dedicated to the son of the Duke of Ossuna, whose father, Don Pedro Téllez-Girón (1574/5–1624), was at that time the Acting Viceroy of Naples.32 In Naples, Téllez-Girón had gained a reputation for promoting the arts and collecting books.33 Earlier in his career (1602–08) he had served in the Netherlands and had played a crucial role in reconciling various groups of mutinous soldiers. In this edition of Le guerre di Fiandra, Francesco Lanario or his editor emphasized the heroic deeds of Ossuna senior and interwove them into the main narrative.34 Lanario thereby presented Téllez-Girón as a prime example of military honour and prudence, and actively promoted a positive image of the Viceroy. This is not surprising, for as we have seen, Lanario returned from the Netherlands to the Italian peninsula around 1616/17 and for the rest of his life pursued an administrative career in Habsburg service. During the following years, Lanario would continue to flatter Neapolitan viceroys. He wrote at least three more political, moral, and military treatises.35 In 1630 in Naples, he published an essay, the Espeio del Duque de Alcalá, in this last genre, in Spanish.36 Lanario must have mastered this language quite well, for he had been at the court in Madrid during the early 1620s. The patron of the essay was, again, the current Acting Viceroy, Fernando Afán de Rivéra (1583–1637), who had followed in the footsteps of his father-in-law, Pedro Téllez-Girón. Lanario’s Spanish Translations Francesco Lanario was thus well connected to the upper echelons of Habsburg administration, and not only in Naples. In 1622, during his stay at the Madrid court, he translated his history of the Dutch Revolt into Spanish.37 The following year, that version was published by the royal printer Luis Sanchez in Madrid.38 As mentioned above, after his return to the Italian peninsula, Lanario published various political and military treatises

Lanario, Le guerre di Fiandra breuemente narrate da don Francesco Lanario caualiero dell’Habito di Calatraua, e del consiglio di guerra di Sua Maesta Cattolica ne i Paesi Bassi. Con l’agiunta de i successi dell’illustriss. et eccell. sig. D. Pietro Girone (Naples: Gio.  Domenico Roncagliolo, 1617). For Naples as an important centre for Spanish book production, see Encarnación Sánchez García, Imprenta y cultura en la Nápoles virreinal: los signos de la presencia espanola (Florence: Alinea, 2007). 32 Giuseppe Galasso, Alla periferia dell’impero. Il Regno di Napoli nel periodo spagnolo (secoli XVI–XVII) (Turin: Einaudi, 1994), p. 181. 33 Jonathan Brown and Richard L. Kagan, ‘The Duke of Alcalá: His Collection and Its Evolution’, The Art Bulletin, 69. 2 (1987), 231–55. 34 Sánchez García, Imprenta y cultura, pp. 105–10. 35 Adolfo Carrasco Martínez, ‘Guerra y virtud nobiliaria en el Barocco. Las Noblezas de la Monarquía Hispánica frente al fenómeno bélico (1598–1659)’, in Guerra y sociedad en la monarquía hispánica: política, estrategia y cultura en la Europa moderna (1500–1700), ed. by Enrique García Hernán and Davide Maffi (Madrid: Laberinto, 2006), pp. 135–62; and for Lanario, see esp. pp. 143–44, 152. 36 Lanario, Espeio del duque de Alcala. Con el exemplar de la costante paciencia christiana y política (Naples: Lazzaro Scoriggio, 1630). 37 Lanario, I trattati del principe, e della guerra. Del duca di Carpignano d. Francesco Lanario, & Aragona (Naples: Lazaro Scoriggio, 1626), n.p. In the preface (‘a colui, che leggera cotesti trattati’), Lanario stated that: ‘L’havermi trattenuto molti mesi nella corte cattolica, & ivi tradotto, & impresso in Castigliano il libro della Guerra di Fiandra, ch’io stampai in Anversa, all’hora che personalmente assisteva in quelle Guerre’. In the Spanish edition of his history, he referred again to the faithful testimonies on the war that he had heard at the Spanish court in Madrid. 38 Lanario, Las gverras de Flandes, desde el ano de mil y quinientos y cincuenta y nueue hasta el de seiscientos y nueue. Por don Francisco Lanario y Aragon, duque de Carpinano, cauallero de la orden de Calatraua, y del consejo de guerra de su magestad en los estados de Flandes (Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1623). 31

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directly in Spanish.39 The first of these treatises was published in 1624 and discussed how a warrior prince should act; Lanario subsequently translated this and the other Spanish treatises he had written into Italian.40 Apparently, by that time Lanario was as fluent in Spanish as he was in his native tongue. Lanario dedicated his history on the Dutch Revolt to none other than the royal favourite, Don Gaspar de Guzman (1587–1645), better known as the Count-Duke of Olivares.41 In his dedication, Lanario stressed the utility of a short compendium for someone like Olivares, whose position did not permit him the time to read existing monumental histories. Nevertheless, Olivares was a very active promoter of histories that upheld the reputation of the Spanish-Habsburg monarchy, and he engaged several historians for his ‘literary campaign’.42 The minor changes Lanario made to this Spanish edition rendered the narrative more favourable to the Spanish-Habsburg monarchy. For example, in the Italian version he had indicated the Duke of Alba’s taxation policy as one of the causes that had fuelled the troubles in the Low Countries. In his Spanish translation he deleted that remark. Moreover, in the Spanish version Lanario added an apology for the mutinous Spanish troops that had sacked Antwerp and slaughtered up to 7000 of its citizens in early November 1576.43 These slight revisions concerning important episodes in the Revolt reveal the sensitivities of his Spanish public and Lanario’s awareness that he had to take these into account. In fact, many of these sensitivities had already surfaced with the publication of Gerolamo Conestaggio’s history on the Dutch Revolt in 1615. In the early 1620s, several authors — including Carlos Coloma — had heavily criticized Conestaggio’s history for undermining the Habsburg and Catholic cause through the veiled criticism he had bestowed upon the Spanish commanders and troops. Moreover, Conestaggio’s history was considered by several Spanish critics to be far too favourable to the cause of the rebels and too polite to William of Orange.44 Besides adding and deleting sentences, Lanario translated one crucial term differently. Rather consistently he rendered ‘i ribelli’ (‘the rebels’ in the Italian version of his text) as ‘los Estados’ (‘the States’ in Spanish), notwithstanding the fact that the Spanish term for rebels (‘los rebeldes’) existed. In his description of the years after 1581 in particular, the adversaries of the Habsburgs were labelled as ‘the States’.45 1581 was the year of King Philip II’s Act of Abjuration, and Lanario’s choice of terms seems to suggest an acceptance 39 Lanario, Los tratados del principe y dela guerra de don Francisco Lanario, y Aragon, duque de Carpiñano cauallero dela orden de Calatraua, y del consejo de guerra de su magestad, en los estados de Flandes (Palermo: Giovanni Batista Maringo, 1624). 40 Lanario, I  trattati del principe, e della guerra. Del duca di Carpignano d. Francesco Lanario, & Aragona (Naples: Lazaro Scoriggio, 1626), n.p. He stated in his preface that: ‘Con molta meraviglio si è osservato, che immediatamente che si stamporno in cotesta città i miei Trattati del Principe, e della Guerra in lingua Castigliana, apparue costì il mal contagioso; per il che non s’hanno potuto leggere fuor di Palermo, solo alcuni ch’io portai meco’. This work was later republished as Lanario, Il principe bellicoso, il quale propone tutte le qualità, virtù, & prerogatiue interne, & esterne, che si richiedono in vna suprema maestà dominante, composto da D. Francesco Lanario et Aragona, principe di Carpignano (Naples: Lazaro Scoriggio, 1631). 41 John H. Eliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares: The State-Men in an Age of Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 42 Kagan, Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 202, 210. 43 In contemporary news reports and later chronicles, the number of citizens killed varies mostly between 6000 and 8000. There are no precise numbers available, nor is a calculation possible. Many archival documents concerning the sack have been edited and published by P. Genard, in La furie espagnole. Documents pour server à l’histoire du sac d’Anvers, ed. by Genard (Antwerp: Van Merlen, 1876). 44 Reijner, ‘Een Italiaanse’, pp. 181–86. 45 This translation appears for the first time on p. 55 in the Spanish edition, which corresponds to p. 81 of the Antwerp edition.

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of the autonomous existence of the States. In the original Italian version of his text, Lanario had already emphasized the fact that once the rebels had adopted the Act of Abjuration, they considered themselves no longer bound by their oath of allegiance to Philip II (1527– 98).46 This translation may also suggest that, by the 1620s — the moment the war resumed after the expiration of the Twelve Years Truce — the general tone at the Spanish court had changed and the rebels were considered regular enemies, albeit heretical ones.47 There are yet further indications that Lanario adapted his text to the courtly environment of Madrid. For example, not only did he point to the efforts of the second count of Olivares, Enrique de Guzman (1540–1607), who as Spanish ambassador in Rome had organized the Spanish Armada.48 Enrique de Guzman was the father of Don Guzman, to whom this version of Lanario’s history was dedicated. As we have seen, Lanario had already added information on one nobleman in particular, Don Pedro Téllez-Girón, in the Neapolitan version of his text; in his Spanish translation, he supplemented the text with short biographical sketches of several other important Spanish aristocrats — including, for instance, Don Pedro de Toledo (c. 1585–1654), Don Diego de Ibarra (d. 1626), and Don Sancho de la Cerda (c. 1550–1626)49 — who had fought in the Netherlands, offering his readers overviews of their careers. These short portraits chiefly celebrated the noblemen’s long careers in the service of the Spanish Habsburg Empire and, more generally, their military expertise, valour, and prudence. Le Guerre di Fiandra in French Translation In 1618, a French translation of Lanario’s Short History of the Dutch Revolt by Michel Baudier (c. 1589–1645), a self-styled historiographer at the court of King Louis XIII, was published. Baudier stemmed from an old noble family in the Languedoc.50 Like Lanario, he was a professional soldier as well as a prolific writer: apart from translating Lanario’s history, Baudier wrote histories on the Chinese and the Ottomans, and his books were published in Paris by Sebastien Chappelet (1589–1647).51 Chappelet, an overtly Catholic printer, had obtained a royal privilege to print Baudier’s translation.52 Although Baudier carried the title of ‘royal historiographer’, it seems more likely that he translated Lanario at the request of Habsburg court circles in Brussels rather than for the French court. Just as Lanario had done, Baudier dedicated his translation to Archduke Albert (1559–1621); he also wrote a separate dedication to Archduchess Isabel Hans Cools, ‘Some Italian Voices on the Dutch liberty, 1560s–1640s’, in The Act of Abjuration: Inspired and Inspirational, ed. by Paulus Brood and Raymond Kubben (Nijmegen: Wolf Legal Publishers, 2011), pp. 107–17 (p. 112). 47 Groenveld, ‘Onder Maurits in het defensief, 1619–1625’, in De bruid in de schuit. De consolidatie van de Republiek. 1609–1650, ed. by Groenveld and Huib L. Ph. Leeuwenberg (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1985), pp. 55–58. 48 Lanario, Las gverras, p. 68. 49 Lanario, Las gverras, pp. 49, 80–81, 125. 50 For more information on Baudier, see Steve Uomini, Cultures historiques dans la France du xviie siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), pp. 119–240; and Edmond Baudier, Histoire de la vie et de l’administration du cardinal Ximénès, par Michel Baudier, annotée et précédée d’une introduction et d’une notice sur Michel Baudier et ses divers ouvrages (Paris: Plon Frères, 1851). 51 Uomini, Cultures historiques, pp. 203–27. 52 Histoire des gverres de Flandre despuis le commencement iusques a la fin. Brieuement recitee par don Francesco Lanario, du conseil de guerre de sa majeste catholique aux pays bas. Traduictie d’italien en francois et augmentee en diuers endroitz […] par le Sr. Michel Bavdier du Languedoc (Paris: Sebastien Chappelet, 1618). On Chappelet, see Jean Henri Martin, Livre, pouvoir et société à Paris au xviie siècle (1598–1705) tome I (Geneva: Droz, 1999) pp. 395, 460. 46

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(1566–1633). In the first years after the Truce signing in 1609, Albert Miraeus (1573– 1640), who later became court chaplain to the Archdukes, had already conceived a plan to counter Dutch propaganda by promoting French translations of the various Italian histories of the Dutch Revolt that were in circulation at the time.53 He therefore contacted the papal nuncio and the Spanish ambassador in Paris as well as Peter Peckius (1562–1625), who had been archducal ambassador to the French throne between 1608 and 1611. The three men agreed to issue a series of translations in French to counter Dutch propaganda initiatives on the international scene. However, in contrast to Lanario, neither Campana nor Giustiniani were ever translated into French. Most dangerous in Miraeus’s eyes was the ‘pestilent’ work of the Protestant merchant-writer Emanuel van Meteren (1535–1612).54 During these years, Van Meteren’s History of the Revolt, originally written in Dutch, circulated widely, first in German, in Latin and then in French translation. The Latin version of Van Meteren (see below) had been published in 1610 in Cologne and seems to have been a private initiative of Caspar Ens (1569–c. 1642) rather than an initiative of the States in the Dutch Republic. Yet, a few years later the States of Holland commissioned a French translation of Van Meteren’s work, which was published in The Hague in 1618, the same year Baudier’s translation appeared.55 The French translation of Van Meteren was assigned to Jean de la Haye (d. 1618) who was a Walloon Church preacher in The Hague.56 De la Haye had already translated works from Latin and French into Dutch at the request of the States-General.57 One notable example is his selective translation into Dutch of the Discours politique et militaire (‘Political and Military Discourses’) by François de la Noüe (1531–91), a famous Huguenot captain.58 During these years, when religious and political tensions between strict and more lenient Calvinists mounted in the Dutch Republic, de la Haye sided with the latter and advocated for religious understanding and unity.59 Given the form that Baudier’s translation took, it might well have been a direct answer to that Dutch initiative.60 In his title, Baudier advertised that he had ‘augmentee en diuers endroitz’ (‘augmented in several places’) the Italian original. Moreover, he inserted a Bernard A. Vermaseren, De katholieke Nederlandsche geschiedschrijving in de xvie en xviie eeuw over den Nederlandschen Opstand (Maastricht: Van Aelst, 1941), pp. 220–22. 54 See Leendert Brummel, ‘Emmanuel van Meteren als historicus’, in Geschiedschrijving in Nederland. Studies over de historiografie van de Nieuwe Tijd Vol. 1, ed. by P. A. M. Geurts and A. E. M. Janssen (The Hague: Nijhof, 1981) pp. 1–18. 55 This translation was sponsored by the States-General: they paid Jean de la Haye 250 guilders for his work as a translator in May 1618. Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal. Nieuwe Reeks. 1610–1670. Vol. 3. 1617–1618, ed. by Johannes G. Smit (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1975), p. 390 nr. 2621. 56 A.  de Groot, ‘Haye, Jean de la’, in Biografisch lexicon voor de geschiedenis van het Nederlandse protestantisme Vol.  5 (Kampen: Kok, 2001), pp.  232–33. He is not to be confused with Jean de La Haye (1593–1661), a French Franciscan preacher and prolific writer, who lived at the same time. 57 For example, in July 1611 de la Haye received payment from the States-General for the translation of Aconcius’s Latin work on Satan into Dutch, Resolutiën der Staten- Generaal. Nieuwe Reeks. 1610–1670. Vol.  2. 1613–1615 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), p. 425. In March 1614, he translated a pamphlet favourable to Maria de’ Medici (1575–1642) into Dutch: Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal. Nieuwe Reeks. 1610–1670. Vol. 2. 1613–1615, p. 223. 58 Den ghematichden Christen, of van de maticheyt die men ghebruycken moet in religions verschillen, tot ghemeene ruste der Kercke, eenicheyt der christenen en ‘s lands welvaren. Seer noodich in desen tydt, om de ghemoederen te matighen, derghener die al te lichtveerdichlijck hare broederen haten en veroordeelen, tot droefheyt der vromen ende blyschap onser vyanden. Ghetr […] uyt het boeck v. wylen de la Nove gheint. Discours politiques & militaires, ende by een ghestelt (The Hague: Hillebrant Jacobszoon, 1613). 59 Arie Th. van Deursen, Bavianen en slijkgeuzen. Kerk en kerkvolk ten tijde van Maurits en Oldenbarnevelt (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974), remains the most comprehensive study for anyone wanting to know more about these quarrels. 60 The royal Privilege assigned to the Parisian printer Sebastien Chappelet dates from 6 August 1618. 53

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‘brieve narration de l’ancienne histoire de Flandre, iusques au commencement de la guerre, & à nostre temps’, a short narration of the history of the Low Countries from antiquity to the Revolt, and a very short discourse on the reasons for the war in the Netherlands. Both additions were also present in the French translation of Van Meteren’s work and thus it seems that Baudier also added these in direct response. At various moments, Baudier inserted brief comments into Lanario’s original account. For example, when describing the 1591 mutiny by Spanish soldiers, he added a remark on the wild and uncontrollable nature of the Spanish, thereby referring to a wellknown stereotype.61 He also moulded his text for a French audience, changing the narrative on the failed Habsburg siege of the castle of Ham, near Péronne, in 1595, by presenting the Italians, who had attempted to take the castle, as traitors, and the French as its heroic defenders.62 Once again, Baudier resorted to a well-established French stereotype — this time of the unreliable Italian. The amplifications of Baudier’s translation are most obvious in his descriptions of the siege of Ostend (1601–04), where he frequently added his own judgments on the horrific nature of war. For instance, at the beginning of his description of the siege, Baudier wrote: [O]r la duréé des guerres de Flandre par l’espace de trente cinq’ans, iusques à la presente année, n’a peu assouvir la fureur civile par tant de massacres commis en l’un, & en l’autre parti, celle-cy suscite un siege memorable qui esgalera en son cours de trois ans, la rage d’une plus longue guerre par le carnage qui s’y fera tant de milliers d’hommes. Mais l’appellerons-nous siege, où l’excez d’une desbordée cruauté, que la rebellion des uns, & le courrous des autres, ont enfanté à la Flandre, comme un horrible monstre?63 Notwithstanding the fact that these Flemish Wars were already going on for no less than thirty-five years and that many massacres had been committed by both sides, civil rage had not yet been calmed down. On the contrary, that rage provoked a memorable three-year-long siege that seemed to have lasted even much longer as thousands of men slaughtered each other. But can we call such an event merely a siege? In fact, the rebellion from one part and the angriness from the other led to terrible cruelties which saddled Flanders with a horrible monster.

Such explicit and dramatic language is a far cry from the much more subtle tone of the Italian original. One wonders if Baudier had perhaps been present at the siege of Ostend or if he had had first-hand experience of the cruelties that were committed during the last phase of the French Wars of Religion. Unfortunately, we do not know whether or not this was the case. Whatever his connection with these events, this dramatic passage underscores the image of Baudier as an opponent of the war; it has in fact been suggested that his translation in 1618 provided support for a plea to negotiate an extension of the truce after 1621.64 Histoire des gverres de Flandre, p. 93. Histoire des gverres de Flandre, pp. 112–13. This failed attempt was celebrated in printed news pamphlets such as La Valeureuse entreprise sur la ville de Han aux frontiers de Picardie (The Hague: Aelbrecht Hendricksz, 1595). 63 Histoire des gverres de Flandre, p. 159. 64 De val van het nieuwe Troje, ed. by Thomas, p. 170. 61 62

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This brief comparison between the French translations of Emanuel van Meteren and Francesco Lanario makes clear that even though the actual fighting had stopped during the Truce, the battle for the hearts and minds of an international audience continued. Most certainly, historiography was a weapon used in that battle.65 The German Translation First published in Cologne in 1625 by Peter von Brachel, the German translation of Lanario’s History was undertaken by Caspar Ens; a second edition was published in 1628.66 Caspar Ens (1568/70–1649/52) originated from Württemberg and was a very prolific history writer and translator with an outspoken interest in the wars of the Low Countries. Ens had lived for some time in the Dutch Republic; from 1596 to 1599 he had been a Latin teacher in Delft, where he wrote a theatre play for his pupils, Princeps Auriacus, sive Libertas defensa (‘Prince of Orange, or the Defender of Liberties’), which was published in 1599.67 This historical drama on the murder of William the Silent, Prince of Orange, was a prime example of a genre that would become rather popular in the Dutch Republic.68 Meanwhile, Ens had left the Republic, yet his interest in the Dutch Revolt remained vivid. After some years of vagrancy, Ens had established himself in Cologne in 1603, where he was to publish, over the next twenty-five years, a vast array of works on the Dutch Revolt. One of the most prolific translators in the Holy Roman Empire, he rendered a variety of works originally in Dutch, Spanish, French, and Italian into Latin.69 For our purposes, Ens’s translation of Van Meteren’s history on the Dutch Revolt, published in 1610 as Belli civilis in Belgio, must be mentioned in particular. During his first years in Cologne, Ens continued to staunchly support the new-born Dutch Republic and translated works in favour of the Protestant rebels.70 Considering this profile, the question as to why he would have translated Lanario’s work into German must be raised. In both his prefaces (to the city magistrates of Cologne and to the reader), Ens emphasized the unique character of the recent wars in the Low Countries. Although many writers had already devoted their attention to this conflict, Ens continued, most of these histories were long-winded. He related that he had wished on several occasions for a compendium of all these histories and that only recently had he discovered such a book. It was Don Francesco Lanario’s history, which he therefore decided to translate into German. Ens’s commentary suggests that Lanario’s history was indeed popular because of its concise nature and readability. Nevertheless, Ens amplified the work considerably, adding over 200 pages. Whereas Lanario’s history had ended in 1609, Ens picked up the thread On this use of imagery see also Kagan, Clio and the Crown, p. 206. Compendium, das ist kurtzer Ausszug ier gantzen Niderlandischen Historien, darin erstlich die Ursachen des Niderlandischen Kriegs, darnach alle furneme Geschichten […] erzehlet wird / In Italianischer Sprach beschrieben. Neben einem Anhang […] bis 1624 (Cologne: Peter von Brachel, 1625). 67 For a modern edition and translation into Dutch, see Caspar Ens, Princeps Auriacus sive Libertas Defensa (1599). De prins van Oranje of de verdediging van de vrijheid, ed. by Jan Bloemendal and Jan W. Steenbeek (Voorthuizen: Florivales, 1998). 68 Juliette Groenland, ‘Toneel als pamflet? De Princeps Auriacus sive Libertas Defensa (1599) van Caspar Ens’, De Zeventiende Eeuw, 25 (2009), 26–38 (pp. 26–29). 69 Burke, ‘Translations into Latin in Early Modern Europe’, in Cultural Translation, ed. by Burke and Hsia, p. 69. 70 For more on the biography and works of Caspar Ens, see Juliette Groenland, ‘Toneel als pamflet’; and Walther Ludwig, ‘Zwei Spanishe Romane lateinisch bearbeitet von einem Deutschen, in Amsterdam gedruckt für einen Dantziger Buchhändler. Das Vitae humanae proscenium (1652) von Caspar Ens – eine Mennipeische Satire’, Neulateinisches Jahrbuch, 8 (2006), 129–76 (pp. 131–42, 174–75). 65 66

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and described all events until 1624. This first German edition covered the conflict until the then current and on-going siege of Breda. In a subsequent edition of 1628, Ens expanded the work even further, describing the events until 1627. His translation kept track of the continuous warfare in the Netherlands and in the Holy Roman Empire, thus fitting into Ens’s activities as a compiler of contemporary news. With the same printer, Peter von Brachel, Ens also published Messrelationen (‘Chronicles’) on a half-yearly basis. These had various titles, such as Historicae Relationis Continuatio and Newer unpartheyischer Teutscher Mercurius.71 On the basis of these chronicles and of the other translations that Ens made in Cologne, Walther Ludwig has suggested that Ens had meanwhile converted to Catholicism.72 In this period, Cologne had become an important printing centre for Counter-Reformation books.73 Should we, perhaps, also understand Ens’s translation of Lanario in this light? In his translation, Ens followed Lanario’s text as faithfully as possible. For example, his description of the murder of William of Orange was precisely in line with Lanario’s wording. Apparently Ens no longer felt the need to stress that William of Orange had been a hero, as he had done in the Latin theatre play he had written two decades earlier. Neither did Ens insert comments or judgments as the French translator Baudier had done. The changes he made to the text were therefore minor, and yet they are significant: he translated ‘Inquisition’ as ‘Spanish Inquisition’ and rendered the Council of Troubles as the ‘Blutraht’ (‘Blood Council’), both terms used by the Protestant rebels. However, besides these minor changes Ens’s language was not particularly influenced by Protestant views on the conflict — rather he used terms that were very common in contemporary German texts on the Dutch Revolt.74 Ens’s translation thus had the potential to appeal to both Protestant and Catholic readers in the German lands. Unlike Conestaggio’s history, Lanario’s was not published in the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth century.75 Yet one of the most famous history writers of the Dutch Republic, Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft (1581–1647), read Lanario’s history alongside many other Italian histories on the conflict. He had borrowed a copy of Lanario from a member of the Frisian States while preparing his own magnum opus, the Nederlandse Historiën (Dutch Histories, 1642). Although Hooft would have liked Lanario to elaborate his history in more detail and considered him too superficial in places, Lanario was one of his models.76 Conclusion This essay shows that, Francesco Lanario was not only a talented administrator but also a gifted historian. He wrote a well-informed, concise, and precise overview of the Dutch Revolt up to the signing of the Twelve Years Truce. Notwithstanding the fact that Lanario Christoph Reske, Buchdrucker des sechszehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebied (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007), pp. 462–63. 72 Ludwig, ‘Zwei Spanische Romane’, pp. 131–42. 73 Johannes Arndt, Das Heilige Römische Reich und die Niederlande. 1566–1648: Politisch-konfessionelle Verflechtung und Publizistik im Achtzigjährige Krieg (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998), pp.  192–94, 217–30, 266–74; and Geert  H. Janssen, ‘The Counter-Reformation of the Refugee: Exile and the Shaping of Catholic Militancy in the Dutch Revolt’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 63 (2012), pp. 671–92 (pp. 678, 688). 74 Arndt, Das Heilige Römische Reich, pp. 217–30. 75 The 1634 edition was published by Bonaventura and Abraham Elzevier in Leiden, Gerolamo Conestaggio, Historia delle guerre di Germania Inferiore (n.p.: n. pub., 1634). 76 De briefwisseling van Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, ed. by Hendrik W. van Tricht and others (Culemborg: Tjeenk Willink/ Noorddijn, 1977), ii, pp. 414–16: ‘Decerpsi […] Lanario […] hic tantum Rerum fastigia summa sectus’. For more on the influence of Tacitus through contemporary Italian authors on P. C. Hooft, see Johannes D. M. Cornelissen, Hooft en Tacitus. Bijdrage tot de kennis van de vaderlandsche geschiedenis in de eerste helft der 17de eeuw (Nijmegen: Dekker & van de Vegt, 1938), pp. 18–28. 71

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was a servant of the Habsburg crown, he did so in a surprisingly neutral tone. Lanario had respect for the qualities of his enemies and therefore tried to write sine ira et studio; he was one of those rare contemporaries who wrote about the conflict without appearing openly biased or clearly partisan. He concluded his work by stating that the Revolt was not only a Dutch, but rather a European civil war, and that the Habsburg monarchy had spent an enormous amount of money on the enterprise without being able to subdue the enemy.77 Precisely for these reasons, Lanario’s text proved to be hugely popular. As we have argued in this article, Lanario’s moderately pro-Habsburg view on the Revolt could be credibly adapted for various audiences and subsequently disseminated within the vast Spanish Habsburg composite monarchy and even beyond to a wider international public. The cities where Lanario’s work was printed were all known as centres for Catholic publishing and the publishers targeted Catholic readers first of all, though the German translation might have appealed to a Protestant audience. The various translations show that translators took national context into account: Lanario slighty altered some passages in his Spanish translation to please his Spanish audience, and Baudier referred to known French stereotypes about Spaniards and Italians. Although Ens only introduced minimal changes in his account, he referred to some German commonplaces on the Revolt. Translators could also seriously alter the tone and the length of the original work. Lanario originally wrote his history, he says, to understand the origins of and the reasons for the Revolt. Only later did he translate the work into Spanish, changing some passages and expanding the text, perhaps to use better as a tool to flatter the Spanish nobility in Madrid. Baudier used a different, more dramatic tone and style, while Ens praised Lanario’s concise writing yet doubled the number of pages. In his hands, Lanario’s concise history became a very long-winded contemporary chronicle. The many re-workings, re-issuings, and translations of Le guerre di Fiandra brevemente narrate show that Lanario’s history was a European success story.

Lanario, Le guerre di Fiandra, p. 208. This is an English paraphrase of the original: ‘In questa maniera ha terminato la guerra memorabile de’ Paesi Bassi, la quale ha costato alla Corona di Spagna un’inestimabil tesoro, e nella quale hanno sparso il sangue, si può dir, tutte le nationi d’Europa’.

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